


do something about him, okay?

by skromna



Category: Persona 4
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:07:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27243181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skromna/pseuds/skromna
Summary: Yosuke suspects that he’s deviating from the script.
Relationships: Dojima Ryotaro/Hanamura Yosuke
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8





	do something about him, okay?

**Author's Note:**

> hm. well.

Yosuke lies flat on his back and thinks about the sheer number of systems, routines, and unspoken agreements put in place to stop anything resembling the current situation from happening. He had never been told not to do this directly, but that’s no excuse. Eyes pointed stubbornly upwards, he dissects the wood-paneled ceiling. He hadn’t noticed it on the way in, hadn’t looked up at all until now. There were more important things to worry about. 

The ceiling slides out of focus and Yosuke blinks. He goes over his excuse — his _alibi_ , ah-ha-ha — for the thousandth time and tries to convince himself that it holds up. In his mind he recites the exact words he’d say, the exact cadence, the exact gestures he’d make, if anyone asked him about the movie that he’d supposedly been watching — he has to turn his head away from the ceiling to check, eyes flicking over to the analog clock on the nightstand and then back up again — fifty-seven minutes.

 _I liked it so much, I just had to see it again_ . That was the best he could come up with. At least it was harder to catch him in a lie this way. No one would think too hard about it. _It’s even better the second time around, trust me_ . He knows that he has to account for his tendency to not shut up, or at least try to practice a little restraint. _Knowing the twist changes the entire viewing experience_ . The process feels automatic, but Yosuke’s still having trouble focusing. He’s vaguely aware of the warmth of Dojima’s body at his immediate right, vaguely aware of the rhythm of his breathing. _I think that I’ll buy the soundtrack if I ever get the chance_ — 

Yosuke feels the mattress shift under him, then feels a palm on his abdomen, not lecherous (he hopes), just there. He shifts at the contact, doesn’t react further than that. The only thing he wants to do right now is keep lying still until he can claim his muscles as his own again. He had expected — hoped, again — that Dojima had drifted off. _Look alive_ , _Yosuke_. 

He tilts his head down slightly, meeting Dojima’s eye. That weak smile is there, minus the expected cigarette. Of course there isn’t a cigarette — if he actually had been smoking, Yosuke would’ve bitched about the smell. This is another love hotel rule that Yosuke hadn’t previously been aware of, probably. 

He smiles in an attempt to match him. His hand goes to Dojima’s, fingers resting on his knuckles. The smart thing to do is try to be nice. And fine, Yosuke wants to be nice. “Again?” He’s only half-joking. He really doesn’t know what to expect from him here. 

Dojima shifts on his forearm, narrows his eyes in response. He opens his mouth to say something, stops him, then laughs once. “You can’t be serious.”

“Yeah, no, I’m —” Another smile, a controlled flash of teeth. “I’m pretty beat.” Understatement of the year. The hand that was on his abdomen is now interlaced with Yosuke’s. Extra precaution. 

He gets it wrong, anyway. There it is — that apologetic look on his dumb face, that frustrating undercurrent present in every single one of their interactions, plainly displayed. Poor, poor Yosuke. Adrift in this world. Hapless waif that he is, to fuck him in any circumstance is to take advantage. Yosuke’s sure that his eye actually twitches. He has to be nice to him. 

He takes action before Dojima can annoy him even more. His other hand goes to the back of Dojima’s neck, he shifts on the mattress, attempts to sit up more. He tries to pull Dojima towards him but he resists at the last second. Wrong again, apparently. 

Yosuke opens his eyes. At the very least, Dojima isn’t looking at him like that anymore. A smile on his face, as if Yosuke were nothing less than the ultimate object of endearment. It’s amazing how oblivious he is to Yosuke’s thoughts. It’s nice to be adored. Dojima is easily distracted, and Yosuke has to remind himself to keep this in mind. He’s lazy, honestly, he hates dramatics, and he hates thinking about this more than he has to. _Be nice_ , Yosuke tells himself. He feels a twinge of guilt for the bitter contempt he felt earlier — that’s a dangerous thing, and he shouldn’t let it happen.

Dojima squeezes Yosuke’s hand. “I was going to say,” he starts, “we should probably get cleaned up.”

“Oh.” Another question answered. Of course they have to do this. Yosuke feels disgusting. He becomes aware of the sweat on his skin, on the sheets, of the — _Jesus_ . He tries not to squirm, nods instead. “Okay.” There’s no way he can go home like this. _He has to go home after this_. 

Dojima climbs over him and out of the bed. Yosuke sits up on his forearms but makes no move to follow him, not yet. At some point when he hadn’t been looking Dojima had slipped back into his underwear. Maybe he thinks this is polite. Typical.

He turns to face him again at the bathroom door, fixing him with a look he can’t read. Yosuke wants to hide. 

“What?” Too sharp.

“Nothing.” Dojima frowns slightly. “I’m going to run a bath.” 

A theory emerges: he is currently an unwilling participant in a practiced routine. What’s funnier, Yosuke filling in for some good-enough co-worker, a discreet almost-girlfriend, or his dead wife? Dojima has disappeared into the bathroom, and Yosuke allows himself to fall back into the pillow, to laugh weakly. Some inner part of him feels hollow, because it’s not funny at all. In any case, the theory falls apart — Dojima doesn’t treat him like an adult at all. He resumes lying still.

He realizes that he could fall asleep here, if his nerves would allow it. This encounter could be granted some semblance of normalcy. It’s almost five in the afternoon, but maybe he could close his eyes, wake up two hours later, and magically feel better. Realistically, Yosuke knows that he can’t account for another two hours. He doesn’t know Dojima’s excuse, but he’s sure that he doesn’t have time to spare, either. 

It’s weird, and it’s uncomfortable, and it almost hurts: Yosuke finds himself wishing that he was dumb again. Longing for the person he once was — that’s a sad cliche, but he gets it now. He worries constantly. He now has to apply infinite care to the things that he used to be able to do without a second thought. He can’t even look his best friend in the eye. 

His eyes go to the bathroom door. As gross as he feels, Yosuke remains still. He still wants to sleep, but Dojima probably doesn’t want to pay for another two hours. He would if Yosuke asked, though. Dojima would do anything if Yosuke asked. This fact doesn’t make him as happy as it once did. 

Yosuke closes his eyes for five seconds. He opens them, folds and extends his legs, sits up fully on the edge of the bed, then stretches once more before finally stumbling to the bathroom. 

* * *

Yosuke can only ask this if he’s not looking at Yu. This isn’t a big deal. He shouldn’t be treating it like it is. He draws a continuous spiral in the top left corner of his notes to appear absentminded. 

“Yu,” he starts, and he realizes that the library is the worst place to start this conversation. Too late now. He trudges forward, all that’s missing is the deep breath beforehand. “Don’t you think that your uncle might be kind of lonely?” He hopes that Yu doesn’t catch on to the fact that the phrase is very well-rehearsed. ‘Your uncle’ was a safe choice. It would be too weird to call him ‘Dojima-san’ to Yu’s face. 

Yosuke ventures to glance at Yu to his left. He likes to think that he’s practiced in being nonchalant. Yu’s fixing him with a mildly confused look. Things don’t really take him by surprise. He never really teases Yosuke, either — one of the main reasons why he felt that it was okay to talk to him about something as weird as this. 

He just squints slightly, like he’s considering something. Finally, an answer: “I don’t really know what you mean.” But he says it like he might, like he’s hesitant to talk about it.

Yosuke is left to flounder some more. “I’m just saying” — he looks away quickly — “he doesn’t really have any friends.” It’s true, or at least the very little that Yosuke knows about him seems to suggest so. Every time that Yosuke had seen him he had been alone, save for Adachi on one or two occasions. (He really only sees him around Inaba when he’s on duty, doesn’t he? When is he not on duty? How is that any way to live, always working?) 

Yu seems more willing to engage with the question. “I guess not.” He leans back in his chair, looking forward. “It’s funny.” (He’s not laughing.) “I’ve never really thought about it like that before.” (About what?) Yu looks at him, a little wide-eyed. “Is that bad?”

Yosuke shakes his head.

Yu thinks to himself for a second more, comes to some sort of personal conclusion, shrugs, and sits up. He begins to scan his textbook again, and Yosuke knows that this is where the conversation should halt. The subject has been dropped, used up. Yosuke rocks his pencil back and forth between his fingers. 

The library is now too loud, too many people coming and going, too many footfalls. Someone’s bag brushes against the back of Yosuke’s chair as they pass by and he bristles. He had never been able to study as diligently as Yu — he gets distracted like this too easily. 

“Isn’t it kind of sad?” As soon as he says it, Yosuke knows that he’s made a mistake. When Yu looks up from his book, he feels caught. _Idiot_. He shouldn’t have started this conversation at all. 

Yu is suspicious — is that suspicion? What could he be suspicious of? It’s possible that he feels like Yosuke is digging around in things that shouldn’t concern him, things that shouldn’t be his business. 

He has to justify himself before this gets worse. “I don’t want to end up like him, that’s all.” No, that makes it worse, definitely worse. “It’s really sad,” he adds quickly, to push the sentiment once more.

Yu looks away, puts his pencil down. He speaks carefully: “I think that adults are really complicated.” 

It’s a childish statement, coming from one of most mature teenagers Yosuke had ever met. He keeps his mouth shut.

Yu’s looking at him again, full of intent. “It’s not our place to interfere,” he says. “Adults are more capable than we think. We don’t really know anything.” He speaks with cool confidence, like he’s drawing all of this from a deep well of experience. 

Okay, so maybe Yosuke feels a little swell of adoration within him. Maybe he really wants to believe Yu. He’s slightly more willing to accept this conclusion. He thinks about Yu’s parents, the kind of people they must be. Maybe he has to work to understand them, too. It might be that Dojima’s nicer than they are, less cold. 

“It’s good that you’re thoughtful,” Yu adds. Turning back to his book now with a sense of finality, Yosuke knows that this is the end of the line. 

“I guess,” Yosuke mumbles. He wants to say more, but can’t think of anything good enough, anything that might similarly impress Yu. “Thanks.” 

He tries to study, he really does. For something like two minutes he forces himself to read through his history textbook, but nothing sticks. He steals a glance to his left, watches Yu dutifully take notes in his small, neat print. 

_He’s so nice_. A weird thought to have, but it’s true. He’s kinder than Yosuke could ever be, understands things better than Yosuke ever would. He can’t stop thinking about what he said, as sparse and vague as it was (that’s to be expected — Yu doesn’t usually talk on his own for that long). 

_We don’t really know anything_. That part bothers him more than it should. It stays with him, a nagging presence.

He looks at Yu once more before deciding to give up on studying entirely.

* * *

The taste is unexpected. A knee-jerk response — Yosuke spits some of it out onto his fingers with a weird choke-gasp. He brings his fingers to his lip to catch the come before it drips down his chin. 

From above him, sitting in the passenger seat, he hears a mildly concerned Dojima say, “Easy, there.”

Yosuke’s gaze flicks upwards. He has an idea of what he must look like, like a deer in the headlights, for one, but another thing, another image appears vivid in his mind — every AV star he’s seen from this exact angle, superimposed over each other, a gross amalgamation of manufactured lust. Big shoes to fill. He realizes that he had tried to swallow because he had been imitating, with debatable success, girls that he had watched up until that moment, and _that’s_ how it usually ends. 

Yosuke doesn’t need to be self-conscious, because he knows that Dojima likes it — that he’s inexperienced, that he choked, that he tries so, so hard — he just won’t admit it. It’s eating him up inside, probably, maybe. Yosuke likes to think so. 

Right now, Dojima looks worried. He might be cringing, too. Not part of the plan. Yosuke locks eyes with him and deliberately licks his fingers clean, swallows again. “Tastes weird,” he says, talking around two fingers still in his mouth. 

“You —” He stops, laughs weakly. Yosuke isn’t sure what the desired effect was supposed to be, but he knows that he wasn’t aiming for that reaction. He hopes that he remembers, at least. Yosuke wipes his mouth with the back of his hand without thinking.

He hasn’t gotten off yet — Dojima always comes (ha-ha) first. Yosuke doesn’t think that he’s realized that yet. Dojima puts himself back together, working with the buckle of his belt. Yosuke’s eyes go to the angled toe of his right shoe. Tempting. Several times while blowing him, Yosuke had to fight against the urge to shove his hand down his pants, reminding himself that Dojima personally getting him off was half the reason why he was there in the first place.

Even being left alone for a second makes him fidget, desperate for friction of any kind. His fingers press into Dojima’s knee, waiting. He’s grateful when Dojima finally takes him by the arm and pulls him up, saving him from the embarrassment of having to grind against his shoe. Maybe Dojima would like that. 

He situates himself securely in Dojima’s lap, one knee on each side of his hips. He angles his head down to kiss him. Dojima breaks away, wrinkling his nose, smiling still. “What’s this, some kind of power play?” His hands go to Yosuke’s hips, squeezing his sides lightly.

Yosuke shifts against pressure, restless. There’s a second of confusion. “Huh?” he breathes, distracted. Realization — right, bad manners, probably. “Oh.” Yosuke ducks his head into Dojima’s neck, preoccupied with unzipping himself. “Sorry.” His fingers shake, knuckles knocking against Dojima’s belt buckle uselessly.

Dojima slips his fingers underneath Yosuke’s shirt and he squirms, half because he’s ticklish and half because Dojima’s fingers are somehow cold. He giggles into the crook of Dojima’s neck (“Stop, stop —”), clutching at his upper arms and trying to suppress the instinct to dig his elbows into his sides. 

Yosuke feels the entire expanse of Dojima’s two hands on him, flat against bare skin, and this seems to sedate him. He goes still, then, tries to breathe normally, letting Dojima feel him up, completely at his mercy. 

“You eating enough, kid?” Dojima’s fingers have stopped on the ridges of his ribcage. Yosuke hadn’t realized that he had been screwing his eyes shut. He pulls back to face Dojima head on. 

That’s concern in his eyes, really. “What?”

“You’re skinny as hell, that’s all,” he offers. “I worry about you.” He tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing. 

Yosuke shifts in his lap, the impatience getting to him. “Listen,” he starts, “that’s nice and all, but right now I really —” He’s pushing his ability to form coherent sentences. Also, he really cannot say this out loud, not to him (the fact that he had swallowed his load just moments before somehow doesn’t factor into this). “Just —” Yosuke hides his face again. He places one of his hands on top of Dojima’s, hoping that it’s enough of a suggestion. 

“Magic words,” Dojima intones, just when Yosuke thinks that he can’t get any worse.

He digs his nails into Dojima’s shoulder, eliciting a monotone “ow” in response. “Screw you.” He’s sure that he’s making a face, not that Dojima can see. He angles himself to speak directly into his ear, as if this would save him from the embarrassment. “Please,” he starts, then stops, because he can’t bring himself to elaborate. Was that really necessary?

Dojima deems this a satisfactory answer, because he finally complies, slides his hand past the waistband of Yosuke’s boxers. Yosuke sighs at first contact, fingers digging into Dojima’s shoulders without the intent to harm this time. Dojima does this casually, managing even with the awkward angle, and Yosuke idly wonders if he gives handjobs to teenagers in the passenger seat of his car a lot, and then tries not to laugh even as he’s whimpering into his neck and unabashedly rocking into his hand. He can multitask. 

Yosuke is laughably desperate, though Dojima might be good at this (Yosuke has no frame of reference). He’s finishing in his hand much faster than he would like to. It shouldn’t be that easy. Dojima waits as Yosuke slumps against him, giving him a moment to recover until the courtesy runs its course. 

“Hey,” Dojima shifts beneath him. “You’re crushing my legs here.” 

Yosuke sits up like he’s being pulled out of a trance. “Oh, sorry.” He zips his pants back up, almost makes a move to climb over the console and into the driver’s seat, until his eye catches Dojima’s hand, palm facing upwards from a safe distance, graced with Yosuke’s come. (He really doesn’t have a pack of tissues lying around in here?)

Yosuke turns to him, and maybe he looks too eager, because as soon as he opens his mouth to speak, Dojima interrupts him: “I’m not doing that.” 

“Oh, come on,” Yosuke insists, even though they both know that there’s no chance of this happening, ever. “You can just try it, can’t you? I did it.” He pokes him in the ribs for added emphasis, grinning openly. 

“I’m —” He starts laughing. “I’m not you.” Ain’t that the truth. 

“For me? Or at least let me kiss you again —”

The hand is now poised like a weapon. “Do you happen to like this shirt?” He tugs on the hem with his clean hand in warning. 

Yosuke finally surrenders, sighing and rolling over to the side, making Dojima open the car door and climb out himself. 

Curled up in the seat, self-satisfied, Yosuke watches through the open door as Dojima ventures further off the road that the car is parked on, into the night. He even sees him stumble once (“You need a cane, old man?” he calls out, and Dojima turns around to scoff in exaggerated indignation.) Then, reaching a suitable tuft of grass, he crouches and wipes his hand several times. Yosuke barks out a laugh at this, then laughs some more, then laughs so much his stomach hurts, even as Dojima gets into the driver’s seat, and he’s still grinning when he starts the car. 

Great, this is really great. Yosuke can now lie awake at night and swell with pride at the fact that somewhere just beyond Inaba’s city limits there is a patch of grass with his semen spread over it, sitting adjacent to a desolate road where he received one of the best — one of the only — handjobs of his life so far. 

He relays this to Dojima in one way or another as he puts the car into drive, and Yosuke convinces himself that he’s trying very hard not to smile when he ignores him completely and tells him to buckle his seatbelt. 

* * *

Yu catches up to the rock before Yosuke can get to it himself, walking just a single step ahead of him on the flood plain. “Hey,” he starts, distracted as he kicks. Somehow he does this better than Yosuke had. “Do you want to have dinner at my place tonight?”

Yosuke perks up, eyes off the ground. This is a rare thing. This could also be a very, very big problem. “What’s the occasion?” A normal, safe question. His turn to kick. 

“Nothing special.” Yu looks over his shoulder, now a few more paces ahead. “I mentioned that I wanted to cook something, and Dojima said that I could have a friend over.” He kicks the rock back to him, and Yosuke jumps to catch it under his shoe. “What’s wrong?”

The problem reveals itself to be more complicated than he had anticipated. “Huh?” Yosuke prays that Yu hadn’t noticed the way that his voice had jumped an octave. He presses the rock into the ground. “Nothing.” Kicks again. “Why’d he say you could invite someone?” 

Yu shrugs. “I don’t know.” A beat. “Are you coming?” He ignores the rock this time.

As casually as he can possibly manage, Yosuke asks: “What did he say?”

“Hm?” 

“Dojima.” He catches up to the rock, kicks it farther than he had hoped. “What did he say, like, exactly.” 

“Oh.” Yosuke and Yu fall into step again, and Yosuke can see that he’s furrowing his brow. “Something like, ‘you can invite a friend, if you want’. I guess it was kind of offhand.” Yu ignores the rock again. Only Yosuke notices and kicks in his stead. “Why?”

“Uh.” (Kicks.) “I just want to make sure that I’m actually, like, welcome.”

“What?” Yu smiles lightly, as if seeing the solution to a minor complication. “Of course you are.” 

Yosuke suddenly pivots, and launches the rock into the river with a swift kick. “Will Dojima be there?” A small splash. 

“Yeah, he will.” Another small rock somehow materializes at Yu’s feet. He kicks it, farther than Yosuke’s had gone. He points this out before adding: “Don’t tell me that you’re scared of him.” 

“No way.” He scans for another rock so that he doesn’t have to meet Yu’s eye. (And also: “I kicked mine at an angle. It doesn’t count.”) _No, wait._ Yu has just handed him a good excuse, an ample life preserver that he had almost tossed out the window. Almost. “Maybe a little bit.” 

Yu had stepped away in search of another good rock. He’s turning to laugh at him, surely, until a girl in their grade but not in their class passes in between the two of them, and Yu shuts up to be polite. The game is abandoned prematurely, they continue down the route home. 

Yu picks the conversation back up again. “So you’re coming, right?” 

Oh, right. Yosuke had forgotten to answer him entirely. “Yeah, sure.” Easy, practiced smile. “Sounds fun.” He wants to explode. “Nanako will probably be happy to see me.”

She was. Or maybe she was mostly enthusiastic about the colorfully packaged dorayaki that Yosuke had picked up from Junes thirty minutes before. In any case, she greets him at the door with an easy, innocent warmth that makes Yosuke want to drop everything and run, as if this would reverse damages. 

Instead, he matches her grin and asks if Yu’s in the kitchen. 

He is. Nanako leads him into the home, and Yosuke feels as if he’s entering for the first time. _Like consensual home invasion_ , he thinks. They meet Yu, he and Yosuke do a more reserved repeat of the exchanges that had taken place at the door. The point is that he’s happy to see him too, and this stings. 

A brief (natural, normal) silence follows, and Yosuke jumps to fix this. “What’s the gardening stuff for?” he asks, dumbly, indicating towards the bucket in Yu’s hand. At this point Nanako had already wandered back to sit on the floor.

“Oh,” Yu beams, a rare sight. “I’m going to harvest a cabbage for the sukiyaki.” He appears proud of himself, until Yosuke asks if it’s really the season for hot pot. Yu responds that it’s close enough, and that he really doesn’t have any right to complain as a guest. 

Yosuke lets him go, and he makes to go sit on the couch, until Yu turns, not three steps out. “Actually, before I forget” — Yosuke hopes that Yu hadn’t noticed the acute tensing of his shoulders when he had spoken — “that CD you let me borrow is still sitting in my room.” Yosuke had completely forgotten. There were bigger things on his mind these days. “You can go grab it now, if you want.”

It’s almost embarrassing how quickly the pieces click into place. “Oh, sure,” he says. Yosuke is continually baffled by the level of trust he is shown in this home. “I won’t find any weird stuff up there, will I?” _Don’t mess this up_. 

This gets Nanako’s attention. “Not if you don’t look for it,” Yu says, lightly. Nanako clearly has a question on her mind. Yosuke switches between looking at the two of them, who both seem to be focusing on _him_. Yu continues, “I think I left it on top of the cabinet, anyway. Easy to find.” 

Yosuke looks away, locks eyes with Nanako for a split second. How does it look like she knows _so much_? Back to Yu. “Okay.” He feels like he should’ve thrown in a joke somehow. 

Yu turns his back, and Yosuke is let loose. _Go, go, go_ . As soon as Yosuke feels that Nanako’s eyes are no longer boring into his back he moves at double the pace, almost scrambling up the top half of the stairs. _Oh, Yu, how could you have set up such a perfect scenario?_ It’s almost ridiculous, this opportunity that has been placed in his lap. 

He stops in place once he steps onto the second floor, just barely planning the next course of action. Now that he’s actually within reach of this, it’s more a matter of convincing himself that it’s okay. He knows which door belongs to Yu. He’s been here before, several times. Yu knows that he knows which door is his. If he’s caught, he can’t claim — but Yu’s occupied, he has no reason to — 

(A hesitant step in that direction, and then another, quicker one.)

But when had Yosuke’s luck so consistently worked out for him? It could be that this is some cosmic test. The variables have all lined up so nicely.

(Another step.)

And what of the moral implications? Can he really just invade — no, yeah, he totally can.

Holding his breath, careful and slow, Yosuke twists the knob of the door and pushes it open, peeking inside to discover a bathroom. Okay. 

He glances down the hall to what _has_ to be the right room. He doesn’t think, only moves in that direction, because he can feel his allotted time running out. _How long does it take to harvest a single cabbage? Just how good is Nanako’s perception of time, in general?_

Too late to think now. His hand is on the door knob, the door is opening. This time, he gets what he is looking for. What a treat: Dojima’s room is incredibly boring. A folded futon lying in a heap among old-looking furniture. It’s kind of small. Yosuke’s sure that his own room is bigger. Standing upright, no longer leaning against the door, he frowns. It doesn’t even smell like him. What was he expecting, really? The answer to all of this? Some clear message plastered across the walls, strewn atop the flooring: _he won’t ever tell you this, but —_

He takes a step inside, in spite of the voice at the back of his head telling him that this is a bad idea, that he will just know somehow. He finds himself in the middle of the room, feet planted.

A neat little shrine to him would’ve been nice. His picture (better yet: pictures, plural) taped to the wall, decorated with stolen pieces of clothing. That would’ve been funny. And obvious. Yosuke idly wonders if he can stuff one of Dojima’s ties in his pocket for bad things to happen to it later. He lifts one foot to step towards a pile of dirty laundry, until the sound of the front door of the house opening causes him to freeze in place. 

Yu is back in the house. No, no, even worse: _Dojima is back in the house._

Yosuke feels as if he were just forcibly pulled back to reality. He abandons the current operation, rushes into Yu’s slightly more remarkable room, his heart slamming against his ribcage. He finds the CD easily — it was on his coffee table, not his cabinet — scrambles for it, and steps out and to the stairs, as quickly as he can manage on tip-toes. He takes two stairs at a time on his way down, almost collides with Yu as he stumbles out of the hall, thankful to every deity in the sky that it is _just_ Yu. He then has to pray that Yu can’t also hear his heartbeat. Christ, that ordeal took a lot out of him. 

“Hey,” Yu starts, a little wide-eyed. 

“Hi.” Yosuke forces himself to laugh, once, because it seems like the right thing to do, and then it doesn’t. “You get that cabbage?”

Yu is very obviously holding the cabbage. “Yeah.” He scrutinizes him briefly. “I see you found the CD with no problem.” Yosuke has come to a point where he can admit to himself that he only imagines a good half of the suspicion that he interprets from Yu’s generally stoic manner, but the revelations only come when he lies awake in bed at night, never in the moment.

Yosuke nods, and Yu slowly mimics him, unthinking. He goes to the kitchen, and Yosuke stands in place for two seconds before going to sit on the couch. He places the CD on the dining room table as he passes, presses into it with his fingers for a fraction of a second. Just a tiny amount of stability. 

He’s behaving like an insane person, he realizes. Worse: he’s behaving like an insane person and Yu can definitely tell. Nanako probably has some solemn child’s intuition to spare as well. Attack on all fronts. 

Nanako doesn’t look up from her quiz program when Yosuke sits on the couch behind her. Yosuke opens his mouth to say something easy and friendly to her, but the words don’t come. He looks to Yu in the kitchen, appearing to slice ingredients. With his back turned, Yu says, “Don’t worry. I’m leaving out the tofu for you.” Yosuke does not need to be reminded of his high level of perception right now.

He responds with a weak ‘thank you’ and turns his attention back to the TV. He tries very hard to watch the show. These people, with their stupid answers and their wasted lives. He realizes that he’s bouncing his leg in the way that his mother had always hated. He realizes that he’s hunched over. 

He stands abruptly, steps into Yu’s station in the kitchen. Again he feels like an invasive presence in this home, miraculously undetected. 

He keeps his hands behind his back, standing at Yu’s side while keeping a healthy distance. Yu looks up once but doesn’t say anything. Yosuke watches him like a normal person would, asks appropriate questions like a normal person: Are you following a recipe? How often do you cook? When’s Dojima coming home? Do you need me to help?

(He gets semi-distracted answers: kind of, not often, soon, nobutthankyou.)

Yu thinks for a moment then, absentmindedly tapping his knife on a cutting board. “I told Dojima to let me know when he would be on his way, but he called me when I was outside just now.” He frowns slightly. “Too early. It won’t be ready by the time he gets here.” 

“So what?” Yosuke leans against the counter, feeling excessively casual. “He’ll live.” 

“Oh, no,” he says. “He just gets in the way.” He doesn’t look up, but Yosuke has the creeping suspicion that _he’s_ currently in the way. He decides to hang around anyway. What else is there to do? 

He examines the fridge in his boredom (strangely empty, populated by the most random food items). He asks Yu questions, pokes fun at him, asks more questions (Yu indulges him, because of course he does). He thought it impossible, irresponsible, but he deems it safe enough to relax, just slightly lower his guard. 

Yu evidently picks up on Yosuke’s restlessness, because in the middle of the easy back and forth they fall into he says, “Actually, Yosuke, do you want to cut the shiitake stems?” After a moment of thought: “Cut stars into the tops, too.” 

Yosuke suspects that this is the easiest step of the recipe, the single task that he can be trusted with. He takes the small kitchen knife and gets to work on a plastic cutting board anyway, mostly because whenever Yu makes any kind of assumption about him, as backhanded as it may be, he is never wrong. He enjoys the busy work, the carving that comes slow and clumsy to him, just because he occasionally bumps elbows with Yu and somehow this reminds him that they — despite everything that Yosuke had done, everything he has hidden from him — are still friends. 

They aren’t saying much, letting the popping of bubbling water, the tap of knives, the vaguely jaunty white noise of Nanako’s show, fill what would’ve been a comfortable silence anyway. 

Yu’s quiet voice takes him out of the lull that had at one moment been shared between them and in the next had become just his, without Yosuke’s knowledge. “Yosuke,” he starts, hesitant, and he immediately feels bad, because Yu is never hesitant. “Is everything okay?” The question is deceptively simple, deceptively vague. Yosuke could say anything to him.

The words appear in flashing letters in his mind, as if being advertised on a billboard display: _HE KNOWS._ His answer is gracelessly automatic, as if it were jerked out of him: “Yeah.” A second of silence, noticeable this time. “Why?” He’s doing the thing again, the _excessively, unnaturally casual_ thing, as his brain shifts into high gear, running through every possibility, every slip of the tongue, every careless gesture. A million self-interrogations thrumming to the same beat: _how, how, how?_ Outwardly, he stays remarkably calm, not looking up from his work. He presses his fourth shiitake into the cutting board with light fingers, and the knife glides easily across the stem.

Two seconds pass. “Nothing,” Yu finally says. And he repeats himself, louder this time: “Nothing.” He makes a point to look at Yosuke’s cutting board. He watches him carve a thin wedge out of the mushroom top, then another intersecting it. “You’re pretty good at that.” He’s mostly joking, but there is genuine warmth in his voice, and Yosuke is grateful, then guilty, because he doesn’t deserve it. Yosuke thinks that this part of the evening is done, that the easy friendliness can be restored now, but Yu surprises him again. “Sorry for making things weird,” he says. This prompts Yosuke to look up at him, finally. “I worry about you, that’s all.” 

The awkward, almost pained smile on Yu’s face doesn’t suit him. It’s so unnatural that Yosuke wants to tell him to stop. He has no idea what Yu thinks is up with him, but he’s most definitely wrong — isn’t this a good thing? Yosuke doesn’t have it in him to celebrate this unintentional deception. “Oh, Yu,” he starts, surprised by how easily the words come. “One day I’ll learn how to cook like you, and then you won’t have to feel so bad for me.” 

Yu elbows him, purposefully this time, occupies himself with cooking again, resuming his task of neatly slicing beef. He begins to tell Yosuke about how he saw their history teacher in the shopping district the other day, a distraction so natural that Yosuke wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been listening for it. 

Yosuke expects them to return to more or less the same comfortable atmosphere — Yu is arranging ingredients in a dish, and Yosuke is only now on his last shiitake, taking his time — he almost relaxes into it, until, until, until: the sound of the front door swinging open, the jangle of keys, the front door swinging shut, Dojima announcing his presence automatically, Nanako’s equally automatic but significantly more cheery welcome. Yosuke remembers that he had left Dojima’s bedroom door open. He looks down to realize that he had nicked himself on his finger with the knife, just enough to warrant a band-aid. 

When he turns to Yu, he is already digging around in a drawer looking for one. Dojima appears as Yosuke is applying the band-aid onto his finger. He says something to Yu in the way of greetings and light inquiry, and then, without missing a beat, “Hi, Hanamura.” A friendly, entirely appropriate smile. 

For all his anxiety, his dread of this exact moment, he’s happy to see him. This is bad. He looks different, good, in the warm light of the kitchen, and, actually, Yosuke doesn’t feel bad about this at all. He still can’t read him in the slightest, can’t decipher his motives, can’t figure out why he planned this the way that he did — he refuses to believe that he didn’t plan this. 

“Hi,” he responds. He feels like he’s overdoing it, forcing the calm. He fiddles with his band-aid. The interaction is over in less than three seconds. Yu doesn’t pay any special attention to this. 

Dojima turns his attention back to Yu, listening as he asks him to take the portable stove to the table. Yosuke watches him as he does this, watches him crouch and look through a cupboard just to the right of Yosuke’s legs. He’s never seen him from this angle, he realizes dumbly. Yu has his back to them, fussing with something he left on the dining table. Some tiny, depraved part of Yosuke is expecting to be subtly groped right now, or at least touched in some way. Instead, they just lock eyes, look at each other intently like they hadn’t been able to before. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to glean from this, doesn’t know what Dojima is seeing, either. It’s weird, he thinks, how Dojima carries himself in his own home, not attempting to play the part of the patriarch, barely shying away from the clumsiness of a guest.

He remembers that Dojima is supposed to be the villain here, or at least he had decided this earlier and wasn’t going to let it go. Yosuke quickly kicks him in the ankle before taking the cutting board and turning to carry it to the dining table, asking Yu some cheery, inconsequential question as he went. 

He and Dojima make deliberate eye contact once more, over Yu’s bent head, as Dojima is carrying the stove past them. That’s it, almost, for the rest of the entire evening in the house. Over dinner, Dojima only speaks to him twice. The first time had been to ask him a question about school in response to something that Yu had said, which shouldn't count. The second time was to flatly tell him to take more food. Yosuke had immediately complied, unconsciously feeling for his ribs a moment later. 

* * *

He had mostly recovered from the walk of shame out of the hotel. Yosuke can definitely say that it had been the worst part by far. The exit was discreet, a courtesy that he had expected and yet still been grateful for. The side street it led to had been empty, stark and desolate in the light of day, but this privacy scared Yosuke, made him stick out to some invisible observer. Would a random stranger be able to tell, just by looking at him, that he didn’t belong there? That he was a pretender, someone trying and failing to fit into a role that he himself couldn’t perceive? He had kept his head down as he walked, his heart hammering in his chest for as long as he had been within a twenty meter radius of the building. 

Slinking off of the side street, rejoining the city, walking among regular people going about their regular, mundane lives had not helped much. The worst possible outcome was running into someone that he knew. This fear took top priority. Yosuke’s imagination went into overdrive, running through every possibility, every interaction he could possibly have with everyone he knew. He thought of the excuses he’d give, explanations that any reasonable person would accept, because there are a hundred reasons why he would’ve been in Okina — _the movie, the movie!_ he reminds himself — and yet he knew that he wouldn’t be able to lie in that moment, much less look someone that he knew, someone that might even have a tiny bit of faith in him, in the eye as he did it. 

But he had gotten through it. He made it to the station without incident, where he found that he could actually look up and register the faces of other people. 

He steps onto the train now, a train full of people that he doesn’t recognize, people that don’t recognize him. It’s just short of crowded. Some passengers lift their eyes as Yosuke shuffles inside, cursory, automatic glances, and yet Yosuke still wishes that they wouldn’t look, that he could remain as invisible as he had managed to be in the city. 

There are no seats available in the car. He clutches a hand strap as the intercom chimes, the doors close, the train lurches into motion. He stands among at least seven other people — he won’t count — and he feels hopelessly exposed, as if on display. He lets his head hang, staring at his shoes, at the shoes of others. Yosuke feels that he is at the mercy of the other passengers, that they can see him and just _know_ about him. 

The way that he feels doesn’t make sense. It’s not fair, either, because when he zooms out and looks at his life from the perspective of an observer, he should be a victim. The facts laid bare are this: Yosuke is seventeen years old and stupid, and reckless, and maybe easily misled. Maybe this outside observer thinks that he has been taken advantage of. Dojima is something like forty, and, unlike Yosuke, he has a fully developed brain, as well as twenty-three extra years of life experience in which at some point or another he should have learned, definitively, not to do this very bad thing. Dojima has no good excuse, by law he is a criminal. This outside observer would be disgusted with Yosuke, surely, but any reasonable person would condemn Dojima. And yet.

The train comes to a graceless stop, Yosuke sways, has to shift on his feet to keep balance. The doors open, more people — more scrutinizing onlookers — enter the car. He imagines them thinking: _look at you, look at what you've done._

It is impossible for Yosuke to think of himself as a victim in this, impossible for him to be a victim at all. He had wanted this — even now, he isn’t sure what _this_ entails — and then he had wanted it desperately, a desperation that had pushed him to become a perpetrator. Even now, he still wants it — that fact makes him feel bad enough, but he knows that it should make him feel worse. 

The worst part of all: Dojima could very well be this outside observer. Yosuke does not doubt for a second that he is a victim in Dojima’s eyes, and that Dojima hates himself thoroughly. It’s so evident in the way that he interacts with him, in the kindness borne of pity, in the pity borne of that deep, deep well of guilt. It frustrates Yosuke, it makes him want to act out, but most of all it’s exhausting. He can’t do anything about it, no matter how hard either of them try. Yosuke can perform a thousand different tricks for him, but this one crucial thing bars him from ever making him happy. 

Right before he had left the hotel room, Dojima had held him by his shoulders and told him to call him when he got home. “I mean it,” he added, even though there’s no reason that Yosuke wouldn’t, because Dojima never asks for him to call. He knew why he was asking then, but he didn’t want to think about it too hard. 

Dojima had brought his hand to the side of Yosuke’s face then, his thumb swiping across his cheekbone lightly. Yosuke had invoked their favorite back and forth (“What?” “Nothing.”) and Dojima had pulled his hand away. Again Yosuke knew why, again he didn’t want to think about it. 

Yosuke placed a sure hand on Dojima’s sleeve, then changed his mind and hugged him. “I’ll call,” he said, wrapping his arms tight around Dojima. “Don’t worry so much.” He hoped that this time, unlike countless past instances in which he had expressed the same exact sentiment in varying forms, Dojima actually listened to him. The exchange of affections had been easy then, and Dojima had hugged him back, quickly. They said their goodbyes, and when the door had closed behind Yosuke a part of him ached. He stood there wishing that he could’ve stayed, clinging to Dojima indefinitely. 

* * *

Yosuke's offer to help with dishes had been politely declined. Yosuke is left to watch TV with Nanako as Yu diligently cleans, and this time he doesn’t mind being left alone. Yosuke’s pleasantly spaced out, mildly interested in the quiz show playing on television, when he hears Dojima speak.

“It’s almost past curfew,” he says. A simple, concise announcement. The information doesn’t mean anything to Yosuke, until it does. He perks up, turning his head to Dojima, who’s getting up from his chair at the dining table, folding his newspaper. For something like five minutes, Yosuke had forgotten about him entirely. 

Yu looks up from the sink, similarly directing his attention to Dojima, mildly curious. Yu absentmindedly folds a dish towel as Dojima continues: “Put Nanako to bed, will you? I’m taking Hanamura home.” Yosuke looks away quickly, suddenly feeling like an unwanted spectator to all this. He looks to Nanako instead, who was very obviously trying not to nod off. From the kitchen, he hears Yu’s flat okay. 

Yosuke stands, feeling hesitant to admit to hearing the conversation that wasn’t meant for him, then feeling stupid for thinking that at all. Nanako switches the TV off in the same moment, mumbling a sleepy “I know,” before Yu says anything. 

In the kitchen, Yu thanks Yosuke for coming, and Yosuke thanks him back, and that’s really all they can do with the present company. A silent agreement is made to talk about all of this the next time they see each other at school, or so Yosuke thinks. The important thing is that Yu smiles at him, grateful for something that Yosuke has no memory of providing. Yosuke watches as he disappears down the hall, Nanako in tow. Only when they are gone does he allow himself to meet Dojima’s eye.

He stuffs something in his pocket and makes a vague ‘after you’ gesture. They walk to the door in silence, where Yosuke directs all of his attention to slipping on his shoes. To be completely alone with Dojima in this house is dangerous, he feels, as if they are on the verge of some wrongdoing or are actively taking part in one. Yosuke is careful to keep his distance. They still haven’t said a word to each other, even after walking out of the house and into the street. 

Yosuke waits for Dojima to light a cigarette with practiced ease. (He hates the cigarettes, and the smell, and the taste when he can taste it, but he lets himself admire the act, as stupid as that makes him feel.) He realizes that this is what he had taken from the house, and he begins to think that maybe this isn’t about him after all. 

When they walk, Dojima stays a few feet ahead. Yosuke is left to trail behind him in silence, feeling like an idiot. What is this, anyway? What does Dojima expect from him here? What does he have to do to please him? Has he already failed? The line of inquiry is frustratingly familiar. Thirty seconds pass, and Yosuke can’t take it any longer. He advances, falling into step. 

“I don’t think you know where my house is, sir,” Yosuke tries. If Dojima is pretending, Yosuke will too. 

He makes a short _hm_ sound. “You’re right. I don’t.” Yosuke takes this chance to look at his expression, and sees that he isn’t mad. He’s relieved until he questions why Dojima would be mad at him in the first place, and then he just feels like the same idiot again. “Lead the way,” Dojima says.

Yosuke nods. He can do that, at least. The conversation ends there. They spend a minute in silence now, except that this time they walk together. It’s comfortable, but Yosuke is selfish, and he can’t be satisfied with just this. The universe has somehow dropped this brief moment alone with Dojima in his lap — to not spend it engaging with him in some way feels like a profound waste. 

This would be easier if he stopped the game, Yosuke realizes. He exhales, then takes the leap. “You’re worse than I thought, you know.” He makes himself smile as he says it. He wants to ask him a hundred different questions instead, but this will suffice. 

Dojima only glances at him over his cigarette, skeptical. “Huh?”

Enabled, Yosuke goes on. “You could have just as well dragged me upstairs. God knows it would’ve been more comfortable than —”

This gets him to break character, interrupting him quickly. “Easy, easy!” he says. They lock eyes again briefly, and Yosuke can see that he’s smiling too, just a little wide-eyed. He brings his eyes forward again, pleased with himself. Even the mild discomfort he feels from seeing the lit-up windows of the houses they pass does not phase him. “I’m being a responsible adult, nothing more,” Dojima adds, and this makes Yosuke smile wider.

“You’re great at that.” 

“Watch it, Hanamura.” 

Yosuke ducks his head now, trying not to laugh too much. He’s embarrassed himself in front of Dojima several times over, but it would still be nice to not leave an impression as a giggling mess. His previous anxiety left over from the dinner is now manifesting as giddiness, apparently. He watches Dojima’s shoes instead. “You know, it’s really hard to keep a straight face when you call me that in front of Yu.” He stuffs his hands inside his pockets in lieu of reaching over to grab Dojima’s, because he knows that even in this good mood he wouldn’t allow it. “Take a right here,” he adds. 

Dojima takes another huff from his cigarette, following Yosuke around the corner. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“The amnesiac treatment really breaks my heart, sir.” By the time he’s finishing his sentence his mind has already gone to another place. He stops, Dojima stops beside him. There are two paths he can take here, one more appropriate than the other. He hasn’t been in Inaba for long, and he had never really been interested in getting a feel for the geography of the town, but he knows that if they don’t take another right here, if they stay on this road, then — 

“Hey, mister,” Yosuke starts, turning to face him. “You wanna…”

“What?” Dojima stares at him for two seconds, furrowing his brow when he gets it. “No,” he says, stern. 

“Oh, come on.” Despite himself, Yosuke glances behind them, regretting that this interaction is taking place in the middle of a wide, well-lit street. “It’s not like you don’t want to. I’ll try to be quick.” When Dojima remains unconvinced, Yosuke quickly adds, “Look, I’ll do you and you won’t even have to return the favor. I’m being really nice, which I shouldn’t be, after what you pulled tonight.”

This gets his attention. “Oh, really.” He takes a drag from his cigarette, and he has to know that Yosuke hates it, with the way that he does it. “Tell me, what did I do?” His hand just barely covers his smile. “My answer’s still no, by the way.” 

“You —” he stops himself. For the first time that evening Yosuke realizes that Dojima hadn’t actually done anything to him, not directly. “Forget it,” he huffs, dragging his feet as he finally takes that right. 

Dojima’s hand passes over Yosuke’s head, ruffling his hair. “As much as I wish it were the case, my life doesn’t revolve around your whims.” 

Yosuke swats his hand away automatically. “It could.” He lowers his voice, because the street they’re on is narrower than the one before and it seems like the right thing to do.

Dojima doesn’t respond to this. Instead: “What happened to your finger?”

Yosuke had been unconsciously fiddling with the band-aid again, picking apart the now-frayed end. “I cut myself on accident when I was trying to help Yu,” he says. “I think I might be bad at this whole housewife thing.” He realizes his mistake a second after the words come out of his mouth. He looks straight ahead. “Sorry,” he adds, not sure if he’s apologizing for the tasteless joke or still engaging with the tasteless joke.

Dojima doesn’t seem to catch it, or if he does he stays quiet about it. Maybe it’s the latter, because all he does is laugh once, then says nothing.

Again they are quiet, and they cross through a section of the neighborhood that’s less crowded than the one before. Yosuke takes this chance to perform a bold maneuver, one that he’s barely thought about. 

“Dojima-san,” he starts. Dojima turns to face him instinctually, and Yosuke steps closer to shove a hand down his back pocket.

A minor almost-scuffle ensues. Dojima jumps at the unexpected contact, makes a startled sound before remembering that he has to keep quiet. He twists to grip Yosuke’s forearm. “What are you —”

Yosuke breaks free, shaking him off, he moves quickly to try the other pocket before Dojima can stop him. “Looking for your cell phone, sir.” When he finds nothing, Yosuke sighs. 

Dojima only stares at him, incredulous. He opens his mouth to say something, but Yosuke interrupts him. “It’s in your jacket pocket, isn’t it?” he asks, and he knows that he’s hit the mark. “I should’ve taken it at the house when I had the chance.” 

“You’re lucky I’m nice,” he says, “really nice.”

Yosuke elects to ignore him, fishing his own cell phone out of his pocket. “I really wanted to make _you_ call _me_ , but I guess —” Dojima narrows his eyes when he holds out the phone. 

He considers it, then considers Yosuke. Finally, he says, “This seems irresponsible.”

Yosuke just blinks, faking obliviousness. “Go on.” For a while now it had bothered him that he had no way to communicate with Dojima, that their meetings only happened because they each had a vague understanding of the other’s schedules and routines. A part of him suspected that Dojima wanted to keep it like this, that this would allow him to deny any premeditation. 

They have a mini-standoff, staring each other down. Yosuke wins out, because Dojima eventually sighs and flips the cell phone open, squinting at the display. Yosuke rocks back and forth on his heels. “You can’t do this as you walk?” he asks, just for something to say. “I’m starting to think that you might be too old for me after all.” 

Not looking up, Dojima responds while biting down on his cigarette. “You’re certainly in a mood today, aren’t you?”

Yosuke ignores him, still feeling restless. Dojima finishes punching in his number, and goes to hand him his cell phone, but pulls it away by a few centimeters when Yosuke goes to grab it. “Don’t save it under my name,” he says, carefully. “And —”

Yosuke reaches for the phone again anyway, just wanting to feel his hand more than anything. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“— And don’t call me when you know it’s a bad time,” he finishes, stern. He loosens his grip, and Yosuke pockets his cell phone.

They walk again. “I’m supposed to memorize your schedule now?” Yosuke asks, even though he basically already has. 

“Use your head.” Dojima catches Yosuke’s dismissive hand gesture and makes deliberate eye contact, brow furrowed. “I’m serious.” He doesn’t look away until he sees Yosuke nod, slowly.

They cross onto a well-lit street now, stepping into Yosuke’s neighborhood. It really is a nice night. Yosuke’s surprised with himself, because he almost never notices things like this. Yosuke had never been one to be awed by the given and the mundane, and maybe that makes him shallow. He’s more pleased with the fact that walking alongside Dojima feels normal, natural, that this fact alone proves that this entire ordeal isn’t some sneaking, insidious mistake. He finds that he wants to reach over and take his hand again to prove it more.

“Your parents won’t be mad that you’re coming home so late?” Dojima asks. Yosuke flicks his gaze over to him, skeptical. He should know that this is a bad question to ask idly, an uncomfortable conversation to start. Unless he has someplace he is going with this. 

“Nah,” Yosuke reponds, turning away. “They go to sleep pretty early. I have my house key, too.” He really isn’t sure what kind of answer Dojima is expecting from him.

“Oh, I get it.” His tone is deceptively light. Yosuke isn’t in the clear, far from it. “Sneaking back in?”

Yosuke shrugs, puts on a guilty smile. “I guess.”

“You didn’t even tell them that you would be out, did you?” A stern undercurrent has wormed its way into Dojima’s tone. He blows out another cloud of smoke.

This elicits another self-conscious shrug. His suspicion mounts. “I let them assume. Better to beg forgiveness, and all that.” When Dojima doesn’t immediately respond, Yosuke gets nervous, knowing that he’s messed up but not knowing how. “Inaba’s a safe place,” he adds, then realizes his mistake. 

He ventures to glance at Dojima, who’s looking at him but doesn’t say anything. Yosuke thinks that he kind of gets it now. Somewhere along the line they had wordlessly agreed not to talk about the murders, so only through this roundabout way can Dojima — do what, exactly? 

“Sorry.” Yosuke mumbles without meaning to. It’s better to stand down before Dojima says anything else. 

“What?”

Yosuke perks up. “Huh?”

“You’re pouting.” 

Yosuke wants to hide. He hadn’t meant to make things more awkward than they had to be. He feels the urge to say sorry again, even knowing that this would make things worse. He wonders what it is about Dojima that makes him feel like everything is somehow his fault, like everything he does is wrong. 

“It’s nothing — you just —” He looks up at him, understanding it a little bit. “You can really act like a cop sometimes.” And then, he understands it a little bit more. Another comparison emerges, slimy and vague, from the depths of Yosuke’s unconscious. He can’t articulate this. He thinks of something else. 

It’s Dojima’s turn to apologize now, except that he doesn't. “Look,” he starts. “Someone needs to look out for you, because it doesn’t seem like you’re looking out for yourself.” ( _Oh God,_ Yosuke thinks. _For both our sakes, just stop it_.) “I don’t want you to get into any trouble.” 

It takes everything Yosuke has not to stop in place and stare at him. He wonders if he’s hearing himself right now. He wonders if this is somehow all a big joke, that he’s playing the part again. If he is being serious, he has no idea what Dojima’s definition of ‘trouble’ is if it doesn’t include repeatedly performing sex acts — the word ‘affair’ is too formal, too neat for whatever they have — for an adult man. This is the manifestation of some deep-seated guilt, Yosuke realizes, it has to be. 

He feels a prick of anger, the beginning of a frustration that will only mount. He twists in Dojima’s direction, readying some petty retort, until he meets Dojima’s steady gaze and stops, doing something akin to cowering but not quite. “Okay,” he says instead, feeling like this is just another way of saying sorry. 

They go quiet again. For the hundredth time Yosuke wishes that he could just know what Dojima’s thinking, exactly, without asking. In the meantime, he becomes aware of the crunch of loose tarmac beneath their shoes, the stretching and shrinking of their shadows. The surrounding houses become increasingly familiar, and despite everything Yosuke is disappointed by this.

He stops in front of his house, Dojima stopping with him. “This is me,” Yosuke says, a little pathetic. They both wait for a long moment. To Yosuke’s surprise, it’s Dojima who speaks first. 

“I worry about you.” ( _What is with these people?_ ) He says this with a soft insistence that Yosuke had never before heard from him. 

“I know you do,” he responds flatly, then regrets it, because even though he’s getting sick of the sentiment Dojima had at least made an effort to be kind. He’s not looking at him, but he becomes aware of the smell of nicotine. “You smoke too much.” 

“Is that all?” 

He exhales. “Can I call you tomorrow night?” 

When Yosuke looks up from the ground he sees that Dojima is smiling, or trying to. “Yeah.” This is Dojima’s last chance to apologize — for what, he’s not exactly sure, but he feels that he deserves one. Any second now.

“Goodnight, Hanamura.” 

No kiss goodnight, either. “Goodnight, Dojima-san.” 

Yosuke turns away and shuffles to his front door. Reaching into his pocket for his key, he feels a faint longing for his bed, his comfortable room, the familiarity of his house. Then, sliding his key into the lock, he remembers, dumbly, that he had forgotten his CD on the dining room table at Yu’s house. He finds that he can't bring himself to care all that much. He steals one more glance at the street, at Dojima’s receding form.

He pushes his front door open and leans against it when it closes behind him, grateful for the dark, quiet, safe house.

* * *

Yosuke’s at a point where he’s willing to admit a few things.

One: that Dojima is attractive. The girls in his grade, not necessarily Yukiko or Chie, maybe, swoon over smooth-skinned male idols, lithe athletes, models, etcetera, etcetera; while he can understand their objective aesthetic appeal he can’t wrap his head around the perseverance of their desire in the face of a lack of substance, of the temporary nature of their looks and — okay, his idols were different. Dojima, on the other hand, was the furthest thing from that world. He embodied what Yosuke thought men in their middle age should be: stoic, authoritative, solid — this was strength, wasn’t it? Yosuke can’t go as far as to flatter himself with the thought that eventually he would be like this too, but one day (he has no interest in applying these standards to himself now) once he’s had his share of teenage exploits, he could strive for this. Seeing a kind of weary sadness creep in on his own father, who Yosuke, sometimes guiltily and sometimes not, had come to regard as a generally sad man, makes him admire Dojima more. 

There was also the purely physical aspect, although Yosuke believed that this also tied in with his personality. He was convinced that by the time adults hit the thirty year mark they were basically stuck in their bodies from that point on, or at least they got comfortable in them. Dojima had chosen a good body to get comfortable in, Yosuke thinks — he could tell just by looking, and, fine, he looks a lot. Conclusion: Dojima was an adult, handsome by middle age standards, who knew his place in the world and didn’t cower from it. Good for him. 

Admission number two: that on some level, he was attracted to Dojima, in the way that only someone like him could be. Admiration, that was it. There was a certain longing — was that the right word? — quality in what he felt towards him, a need that didn’t extend beyond just wanting to be near him, wanting to talk to him. It was curiosity, something that Yosuke had convinced himself he wasn’t ashamed of and yet he knew that he would have to conceal this from Yu thoroughly. He had embarrassed himself enough. (The closest Yosuke had ever come to asking for someone else’s opinion was when he had ended up alone with Chie after school one day and almost asked her if she ever thought of Dojima in any specific way before chickening out at the last second.) It wasn’t like Dojima dominated his thoughts, but he had started thinking of him more often ever since they had run into each other the other night. He could spin it any way he wanted, but it came down to this: he liked him, or he expected that he would. Yosuke knows next to nothing about him and yet he is certain that he is a good person. And fine, a part of him felt bad for Dojima. 

Three: that he wants to talk to him but is too nervous to try. Four: that he has wasted too much time spacing out while looking at the back of his head and that he should go up to him and say something already. He doesn’t know when his smoke break — that might be the one thing Yosuke dislikes about him so far — ends, and he doesn’t have much time himself, anyway. This is the first time he has seen Dojima here, sitting near the edge of the Junes food court, and it may be the last time, so really, this might be this only chance to talk to him without having to break the law first. 

Yosuke inhales sharply, psyching himself up, then takes his first steps in Dojima’s direction, weaving between tables and chairs. He’s glad that it’s getting dark, that the food court is almost empty. Not having an audience for this settles his nerves. Yosuke stops a few steps away from him, to the side of where he’s sitting, and as soon as he sees that his shoulders are slumped, that he looks tired and despondent, he immediately regrets this. That hasn’t stopped him in the past. Dojima sees him, lifts his head and looks at him with mild interest — too late. Yosuke takes the last few crucial steps towards him. 

“Hi, Dojima-san.” He says this with a practiced friendly smile, the one for the first day of school and customer service interactions. Yosuke then realizes that he hadn’t prepared anything to say. He’s not used to having to do that. He waits for the next statement to come, but it just doesn’t. Maybe he shouldn’t have used his name. Maybe he shouldn’t have done with entirely. “Sorry,” he says. “I recognized you and thought I should say hi.”

Dojima doesn’t say anything for a while, just looking at him blankly — not annoyed, thank God, just confused, which Yosuke can’t blame him for. “Yosuke Hanamura, right?” It’s a question, but he says his name as if reading directly from his criminal file, flat and brutal. Yosuke fights the urge to shrink into himself. It’s better than _do I know you?_ at least. 

He allows his smile to drop a centimeter. “Yeah.” One of his hands goes to fidget with his work uniform, but he makes himself stop. “Am I bothering you?” 

Dojima doesn’t answer his question. As if peering over the metaphorical criminal file: “I forgot that you were also the Junes kid.” Yosuke cringes a little bit. At least Dojima’s face loses some of its guarded quality. “I get Yu’s friends mixed up sometimes.” The most surprising thing of all: Dojima really does look apologetic. Yosuke reminds himself that Dojima has — presumably — lived his entire life in this small town where people on the street just talked to one another, a concept that Yosuke couldn’t wrap his head around his first few weeks here. What Yosuke is doing right now is allowed, appropriate, even. 

Yosuke pushes aside all of his inhibitions and takes the brave leap to gingerly sit down on the ledge next to Dojima, leaving a little less than half a meter of space between them. The cement is cool beneath him, and this is somewhat comforting. “That’s alright,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting you to recognize me at all.” 

“Really?” Dojima doesn’t seem to mind that Yosuke has just decided to make this conversation longer than it has to be — Yosuke hadn’t been expecting that. “Didn’t I just chew you out last week?”

Some embarrassing part of Yosuke is glad that Dojima remembered, just because it had been a short interaction, inconsequential to the both of them. It had been on Thursday, Yosuke thinks. Just two hours before, he had crawled out of the TV exhausted, then went home, then was sent back out again after his mother reminded him that he had neglected to run an errand that she had asked him about that morning. He had run into Yukiko on his way back, and he talked with her for as long as it wasn’t awkward. They typically don’t have a lot to say to each other, and every time they talk Yukiko seems to be constantly bracing herself for some off-color joke. Outside of their mutual friends and their involvement with the investigation, they have nothing in common. She left, Yosuke stayed. He had been turning away from a vending machine when he saw Dojima, either on his way home or taking part in some late-night patrol. Dojima had recognized him first, actually, and Yosuke noted that this was only because he had been — or currently was? — suspected of being an accessory to murder. Dojima had reminded him that it was past curfew and told him to go home. (Before that night Yosuke had been only partially aware of any kind of curfew and the way it might dictate his life.)

He had taken notice of one thing — Dojima had looked like an actor. An actor playing the protagonist of a movie that Yosuke would find boring, at best, but an actor nonetheless. Weird. Yosuke hadn’t bothered to explain himself, he just said something to the tune of ‘yes, sir’ and went home. That’s all.

Now, Yosuke just shrugs. “Barely.” He splays his hands over his knees, not sure what to do with them. He’s almost about to apologize to him, but he stops himself. “I’m not some teenage delinquent, just so you know,” he tries.

Dojima peers at him over his cigarette. “Did I ever say that you were?” 

“I don’t want you to get that impression.” Yosuke thinks for a second. “About Yu,” he adds quickly. “Yu doesn’t hang around those people.” He hopes that Kanji doesn’t count in this.

Dojima opens his mouth to say something, and then changes his mind. He smiles, but not in Yosuke’s friendly way. It’s more akin to cringing. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about dressed like” — he indicates slightly with his cigarette as he talks, an unthinking gesture — “that. Nice apron, by the way.” 

Yosuke turns away quickly, sitting up more. “This is for my job,” he says, hoping that he had managed to stay nonchalant. His face feels hot.

“I know that,” he hears Dojima say. Then, after a pause: “Are you not on the clock right now?” 

Despite the fact that the conversation was going remarkably well, considering, Yosuke still fears that this might be a tactic to get him to leave. “Are you?”

“I asked you first.” Yosuke glances at Dojima and sees that he is also looking at him, appearing genuinely engaged, and this convinces him that it would be alright if he continued to exist here for a little while longer. 

“No,” Yosuke lies. “I’m on my break.” The shift manager today is thankfully unobservant, and would probably let this transgression slide anyway. If this had actually been his break, he would’ve been sitting in the back room flipping through a magazine and chewing on a snack bar. 

“Are you sure you want to waste it talking to me?” 

“I have a feeling you’re trying to get rid of me.”

Dojima looks away, and Yosuke, self-indulgent, convinces himself that the hand holding his cigarette is hiding a smile. “Never,” he says.

The conversation reaches its natural end. Yosuke begins to bounce his leg, feeling restless. Earlier that day it had rained, but in the afternoon the clouds had completely cleared out, and now as the day dips into evening there is nothing blocking the last rays of sun from lighting up Dojima’s profile each time Yosuke dares to look in that direction. Never in his life has he paid attention to something like this. 

Yosuke’s body seems to stand up on its own. “I gotta go,” he says, quickly. 

Dojima smiles at him, does a half-wave. “Nice talking to you.” He looks like he means it.

Yosuke’s genuinely surprised when he manages to walk away from that on stable, unwavering legs.

* * *

Yosuke has to admit a few more things to himself. Things that he doesn’t want to articulate, especially not now. 

Yosuke had been eleven when he had first dreamed that he kissed someone. The girl wasn’t anyone that Yosuke had ever known, at least not someone he knew of consciously, but he had woken up longing for her, an ache that he had never before experienced. Pre-adolescent heartbreaks aside, the point was this: it had felt remarkably real, as close to the real thing as his brain could possibly make it. He had thought about it constantly. It was this that convinced Yosuke that girls were worth pursuing after all. Now, when there was kissing on TV, he stopped looking away in shyness; he watched intently, remembering, analyzing, comparing. 

He had no frame of reference (he still doesn’t), no way to know if his hallucination had been accurate at all. It might be worse, he told himself, but he wanted to believe that it would be better. He trusted this dream, so much so that when he was thirteen and his friends had asked him if he had ever kissed a girl he almost said yes. 

Anyway.

That night, Yosuke had dreamed that he was on a beach, one he recognized from a vacation he had been on with his parents in elementary school. Unlike the beach of his childhood, this one was hopelessly crowded. Bodies packed together, greased with sunscreen and barely clothed, repulsive to Yosuke. A stranger sporting sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat had looked up at him from where she lay on her towel and told him to put on his swim trunks. Yosuke’s dream logic had identified this woman as his mother, soon to be joined by his not-father. Yosuke had already been wearing his swimsuit, and yet this woman had gone on insisting, growing angrier. The thought of undressing in front of all these people was unbearable to Yosuke, anyway. He stumbled away from the not-mother, away from the water which he felt intuitively was contaminated, and away from the mass of people on the beach. 

He walked into the adjacent town that he had also remembered from this childhood vacation, except that the town was a jungle, and Yosuke was lost. He was frightened, afraid of stepping on a snake — he had almost done this at age eight, a moment seared into his memory although nothing bad had happened then — and he sweat profusely. It was hot, ridiculously hot, and the air was heavy and wet, so that when Yosuke breathed he never got enough air into his lungs. He stepped through the jungle in this state, searching desperately for a way out, bare feet pressing into loose dirt, constantly fearing for the snake.

Caught in the branches of trees, broken in pieces on the jungle floor, he discovered a wrecked airplane. And then, there were hands. Two of them, pressed against the bare skin of his abdomen. They moved, up his sides, over his chest, everywhere. He hadn’t comprehended how, but he found himself with his cheek pressed against a piece of metal body from the plane. He writhed against the touches instinctively, and when he tried to break free voluntarily he found that his muscles did not obey him. There was a pressure at his back that he hadn’t acknowledged as another body at the time, just a vague force. There had been a rough palm sliding up his thigh, grabbing at flesh that was barely there, and at this Yosuke had worried — a stupid thought, even for a dream — that his swim trunks were too little for an inspection of this nature, that he was being indecent. He also worried about how much he was sweating, and the heat, and the fact that the small exertion of reactive movements made him pant, breathless. 

Then, there were fingers in his mouth, spreading his saliva-slicked lips apart and running along his top gum line, reaching the back row of teeth, examining the bottom set thoroughly, then pressing his tongue down in place. He was having trouble breathing through his nose, and again he worried. 

“Tell me about the gun in the icebox,” Dojima asked. _What gun, what gun?_ Yosuke didn’t know what an icebox was, either. “There’s a gun, isn’t there?” he asked (in Yosuke’s dream, the voice hadn’t had an origin, but when he visualized it later Dojima was speaking into his ear). He sounded so convinced, so sure, that Yosuke wished desperately that he could just give it to him. 

He had a sudden realization, then. Yosuke remembered that his not-mother had been sitting beside a cooler on the beach, and maybe this is what Dojima had meant to say. He feels pride, he wants to tell him that he has the answer, that he knows where the gun is and can even take him there, but he can’t. The fingers had stopped their search of his mouth but they remained there, taking up too much space, and Yosuke couldn’t bring his lips together. When he tried to speak all that came out was a loose string of embarrassing, unintelligible vowels. 

Yosuke woke up then, covered in sweat and very hard. He lay there, trying to recount the dream, and then, still half-asleep, he pawed at himself, not thinking too hard about anything other than his immediate need to get off. By the time he was finished he was wide awake. He looked at his ceiling for a long while. Then he got up, slowly.

He stares at himself in his bathroom mirror now, gazing at tired eyes. It is something like three in the morning. The dream itself wasn’t an issue, it was the fact that Yosuke had masturbated to it that disgusted him (as well as the fact that while he was doing it, he replayed the last part over and over, filling in the gaps). Despite his shame, on some other level he is numb to this, resigned, even. When he wakes up in a few hours he will remember this and feel worse than he does now. 

Yosuke switches off the bathroom light and walks down the hall in the dark, feeling his way to his bed. He comes up with a solution on the way there: if he decides to never think about this again, one day he will forget about it. He lasts about twenty seconds.

* * *

It’s funny, except that it’s really not — Yosuke has to ask for permission to call, and Dojima doesn’t. This would actually tick him off if it weren’t for the fact that Dojima rarely ever calls in the first place, and when he does it’s late at night when Yosuke is most likely sitting alone in his room. Because of this he’s always happy to pick up, eager to hear his voice in his ear. Dojima never calls him just to talk, but sometimes Yosuke is able to keep him on the line for extended periods — his best time: twenty-two minutes. 

The call from two nights ago had a clear purpose, and it hadn’t lasted long. Dojima, sheepish (Yosuke could tell, even over the phone), had somehow arranged for time off this week, and if Yosuke wanted, they could take a trip to Okina (he had paused before he said this last part). Yosuke asked if this was a euphemism for something and then Dojima had confirmed his suspicion. He told him that he could meet him after school that Saturday (he could imagine with perfect clarity Dojima’s wince at this). Dojima told him about the hotel — walking distance from the station, simple and discreet — and Yosuke had hummed in understanding as he talked, said his goodbyes when it was time to say goodbye, then yelled into his pillow as soon as he hung up. 

The next night Yosuke locked his bedroom door, then checked the lock again, then twice, and undressed fully and stood in front of the mirror hanging on the other side of his door. He had never gotten used to this, the sight of his own body in its entirety, but he was determined to be thorough. Dojima hadn’t said anything specific — he never would — but Yosuke knew that Dojima also knew that the expectation was that they were going to have sex, actual sex, and this meant that he would have to be naked. There is no way around this, probably. He huffed and put himself in the shoes of an outside observer, someone who is looking at his body and is presumably attracted to it. It was hard to disconnect. Yosuke had lived there — in it — his entire life, and he knew that it was nothing special. Standing completely upright, he convinced himself that he looked like an alien, that his torso was too long, that his arms were longer and also too skinny in proportion, that his neck was neither too thick or too thin but weird-looking nonetheless. He had almost moved on to dissect his face before reminding himself that Dojima had already seen it. 

Instead, he put his arm on his opposite bicep gingerly, then slid it up to his shoulder, then swiped across his collarbone, pressing into the ridge of bone with his finger. Lifting both arms over his head, he watched his muscles extend in his reflection. He stretched fully, twisting his torso and seeing the muscles follow. Then, he stopped in place, realizing that this was stupid, and that if in this moment he discovered some irredeemable repulsive thing about the sight of his naked body it would be too late to cancel plans anyway. 

School the next day had been unremarkable. He wasn’t able to look Yu in the eye, but he was doing that less these days anyway. He skipped lunch because he hadn’t had an appetite. He almost got caught in a conversation with Chie after school that would have been much longer than he had the time for — he made up some vague excuse and left quickly. Only as he was rushing home on his bike did he allow himself some optimism, and then allowed for some more as he took the shower that he had biked there for. He reminded himself of the way that this whole thing — after today, Yosuke might be able to use the word ‘affair’ — works: he and Dojima make plans to see each other, Yosuke quietly dreads the encounter, he sees Dojima and everything is fine and better than fine and Yosuke is reminded of why he does this at all. Rinse and repeat.

As he dried his hair with a towel he looked at his reflection again, this time using his bathroom mirror. _I am objectively attractive in the way that creepy forty-year-old men like_ , he told himself. _Any forty-year-old man would be happy to fuck me. Especially that forty-year-old man._ He had been trying to make himself laugh, but instead the reassurance made a part of him feel very, very cold. 

Now he stands in a stall in the train station restroom, tugging off his clothes. Just as he was leaving the house he had realized that there was no way he could’ve entered the hotel in his school uniform, and that the uniform also made it easier for people to recognize him on the way there. Dojima should’ve told him something like that. It’s his job to handle logistics, all Yosuke has to do is worry about them. (It’s possible that telling him something like this would’ve been too much of an admittance of guilt for Dojima’s delicate constitution.)

He stuffs his jacket into a bag that he brought from home — again, not his schoolbag — then starts to unbutton his shirt before stopping midway, wondering if Dojima _wants_ him in his school uniform, no matter the risk. Yosuke’s embarrassed after he seriously, truly considers it for more than five seconds. Dojima would never ask something like that of him, but an unhealthy percentage of Yosuke’s daydreams consist of some Dojima look-alike dressing him up and putting things inside him and saying mean things, and sometimes Yosuke gets things mixed up. He should probably give up porn. 

He had brought a pair of inconspicuous jeans, but he’s lazy and doesn’t want to take off his shoes, so he tells himself that his uniform pants are unassuming enough and keeps them on. Just to be safe, he slips on a loose jacket that is just a size too large, thick enough that Yosuke will probably sweat during his walk to the hotel. He exhales and steps out of the stall into the empty restroom. 

He looks in the closest mirror and finds that he doesn’t immediately recognize himself.

* * *

Dojima isn’t smoking, not because Yosuke had asked but because he is being kind. Yosuke lies with his head on Dojima’s thigh in the backseat of his car, legs bent at an awkward angle, doing the best he can with what little space he has. He hadn’t meant to get comfortable like this. Originally, he had crawled into the back to kick his feet up near the window and spend the rest of their allotted hour and a half talking. (They always give themselves only an hour for encounters like this one, but this time Yosuke had successfully managed to negotiate.) Yosuke likes this almost as much as their not-sex (he was starting to think of actual sex — what he thought of as ‘actual’ sex, at least — more and more, so to him this distinction is necessary). 

Dojima had obliged him in this, and was similarly obliging him by letting Yosuke rest his head, keeping very still. There had been a long pause in the conversation, and Yosuke hadn’t paid it any mind because he had been toeing the line between wakefulness and sleep, anyway. 

Only when Dojima begins to stroke his hair does Yosuke realize this, becoming aware of the fact that at some point he had turned his head and let his eyes close. He’s suddenly on high alert, yet determined to stay like this, frozen in place, not letting himself ruin this rare, precious thing. He’s nervous about controlling the movements of his face most of all, because he is sure that Dojima is looking down at him. He wishes desperately to know what he’s thinking about.

Yosuke wonders — and he thinks about this often, too often than he’d like to admit — at what point he stops being adored (even in secret, like this) and becomes another thing dragging Dojima down in his life that he hates. (Yosuke is fully convinced that Dojima hates his life, even just a little bit, maybe on an unconscious level — why else would he do this?) Yosuke has seen movies and watched TV shows and he knows that there is a line and that this line is always crossed. The other woman does something that is too similar to some mannerism of the first woman, maybe she nags at the troubled protagonist, or becomes too clingy, or is too flippant, and the veil is lifted and the protagonist realizes that he loves his wife, after all. Or that all women are shallow. The point is this: at some point Yosuke will prove to be more trouble than he’s worth, and this is when he’s screwed. 

For now, this isn’t the case. (He has to remind himself of this, firmly.) For now, Dojima wants him. For now, his position is secure. Right now, he is being admired. 

Dojima’s hand pulls away, and Yosuke’s first, frustrating instinct is to assume that he’s done something wrong. He hasn’t. He feels Dojima’s hand on his shoulder, waking him gently. “Kid,” he hears him say, soft. (There’s that aversion to using his actual name.) “Don’t fall asleep.”

“I wasn’t going to.” Doesn’t open his eyes, mumbling into Dojima’s thigh. “Was wide awake.” Now he turns his head to face upwards, finding himself looking into Dojima’s eyes. They stare at one another. “I gotta tell you, this is not your angle,” Yosuke says.

Dojima breaks eye contact, looks up and in front of him instead. “Don’t look, then.” Yosuke keeps looking.

They go quiet again. It isn’t comfortable, because Dojima is very obviously thinking about something and Yosuke knows intuitively that he won’t like this conversation. He can never just let things be, can he?

“Listen,” he starts, and Yosuke already wants to groan. Dojima is oblivious. When is he not? “Do you need anything?”

This gets Yosuke’s attention for real. What a weird, vague thing to ask. Dojima realizes it too, because Yosuke sees him make a face. Then, Yosuke thinks, _more than you could possibly give me_. “I don’t get it,” he says instead.

Dojima looks down at him again with that self-deprecating smile, and Yosuke can tell that he doesn’t want to elaborate. He’s genuinely surprised when he doesn’t just tell him to forget it. “I mean,” he tries again, “do you want something?” He realizes that this isn’t any better. “That I could buy,” he adds.

Oh, alright. Yosuke gets it now. Just how many times will they have to do this? “A Suzuki bike,” he says, looking straight past Dojima at the car’s ceiling. “I have catalogs, with all these helpful circles in them. Also, diamonds, just to have, you know? Tickets to — I don’t know, actually. Where do you want to go, Dojima-san?” He wishes that he could have seen him wince. “You know I get my own paycheck, right?”

He can admit that he likes the idea of Dojima spending an unreasonable amount of money on him. Some dark part of him finds the idea immensely appealing, actually. But it can’t happen like this. It can’t happen because Dojima is trying to make his whole existence up to him. It can’t happen as an apology, and it can’t be penance. Dojima’s guilt is a useless, ugly thing. It does nothing for himself and nothing for Yosuke. If Dojima can’t live with himself after Yosuke performs miraculous, brilliant acts to satisfy him then he should just die.

(He tells himself that he shouldn’t be so cruel. Right now, Dojima is kind. Maybe he’s assuming too much. Maybe Dojima fears that Yosuke will grow tired of him just like Yosuke fears that Dojima will. The thought triggers a pang of sadness.) 

Yosuke inhales. 

Again Dojima is ignorant to all of this, just a little self-conscious, feeling chastised but not to the extent to which Yosuke would like. “That’s not the point,” he says. “I mean, well,” he looks down at him, still smiling. He brushes Yosuke’s bangs out of his eyes in an echo of the gesture of before. “How about this: when’s your birthday?”

Yosuke watches him realize his mistake in real time. It’s honestly kind of funny. Yosuke can’t resist the urge to twist the knife. “I turned seventeen in June,” he says, carefully. Oh, he really shouldn’t be encouraging this, but it’s better to make Dojima face this directly instead of letting him dance around it like an idiot. Also, it is _so_ funny.

Dojima understands that he can’t win. He continues on, trying to save face. “Right. Well.” He tucks a piece of hair behind Yosuke’s ear. “Late birthday present, then.”

Yosuke snaps without really wanting to. “Do you think I’m stupid? Be honest.”

“What?” Dojima’s smile drops, and he pulls away his hand. He looks genuinely confused, and Yosuke starts to think that maybe he’s expecting too much of him. Also, he regrets the loss of contact. “Why?”

“Forget it.”

“Is it so hard to believe that I want to do something nice for you?” He’s trying to bring back the light mood that he thought was there.

Yosuke presses his mouth into a line. “You do nice things for me all the time, sir,” he says, deliberate and flat. When Dojima doesn’t immediately respond Yosuke feels a light twinge of panic, fearing that he might be stepping into _hated_ territory. Okay, time to fix this.

He reaches up for Dojima’s hand, grasping it tightly. “Can I tell you something?” He shifts, angles his head so he’s lying in a more comfortable position. He waits for Dojima to nod. He thinks of the right thing to say. “You have blanket permission to spend as much money on me as you want, okay?” He smiles politely. That’s the best he can manage. 

Dojima squeezes his hand in response. “Gee, thanks.” 

“Anytime.” Yosuke kicks his feet up again, stretching them. Crisis averted. “Let’s get drunk on my eighteenth,” he yawns. “You’ll buy.”

Dojima pulls Yosuke’s arm up, tugs again when Yosuke laughs and tries to break out of his grip. “You’d still be too young,” he says. “Can’t have you breaking the law, now.”

Yosuke goes still. He twists sharply to look Dojima in the face, fully expecting to be annoyed with him all over again. But Dojima is looking down at him and grinning, the very last thing that Yosuke would expect. He wants to kiss him really bad.

* * *

Dojima misses the keyhole entirely on his first try, the key scraping uselessly against the metal of the lock. Endorphins are running high, apparently. Yosuke watches this happen while hanging off Dojima’s arm, growing impatient. He glances quickly to his left, but the hall is empty. Against everything that Yosuke had feared, and everything that Dojima had wordlessly taught him, some irresponsible, reckless part of him wants to be seen here. A witness, any random stranger, who would recognize this for what it was and — do what, exactly? Yosuke isn’t sure, but the idea makes him giddy.

He presses into Dojima, holding his arm against his chest tighter. On the second try, the key fits. They stumble into the room, and Yosuke’s kissing him clumsily, fingers clutching at his sleeve, before the door closes behind them like a sigh of relief. Dojima finds his bearings, then kisses him back, holding Yosuke with a hand in his hair. 

Yosuke breaks away, breathing hard. Without missing a beat, and with more confidence than he would’ve expected of himself: “Can I undress you?” 

Dojima pulls his hair lightly. “You don’t waste any time, do you?” 

Yosuke doesn’t bother to defend himself. “I really want to,” he says, with his bestest, sweetest smile.

He takes Dojima’s heavy exhale as the affirmation that he needs. He takes Dojima’s jacket and shrugs off his own, hanging them on the nearest hook without looking. Yosuke gets on his knees and sits back, looking up at Dojima from the floor of the entryway. He appears skeptical, Yosuke remains eager. Finally taking the hint, he wordlessly lifts his right leg a few centimeters off the ground, so that Yosuke can carefully slip off his shoe, feeling the scuffed leather. Yosuke gives the other shoe the same attention. They go way back, Yosuke and these shoes. That’s why the slight reverence is necessary. 

From above him, as Yosuke twists to take his own shoes off: “Satisfied?” 

Yosuke catches his eye. “Very.”

Dojima huffs. “Weird kid.” The only form of verbal affection Yosuke can hope to get with his pants still on. 

Yosuke takes Dojima’s hand and gets to his feet. He steps in front and leads him into the room proper. In the lobby, Dojima had let him pick which one he wanted, wordlessly indicating towards the display when it was time. Yosuke wasn’t able to argue, because up until that point Dojima had not spoken to him at all and Yosuke had suspected that this was some love hotel rule that he wasn’t aware of. (As they climbed the stairs to their floor, Dojima had been the first to say something, leaning in and speaking in a low voice.) He had chosen it with only the fleeting consideration that Dojima would make fun of him if he went with anything too flashy — ‘I think I’m too old for you, after all,’ or something to that tune, because he joked like that now, although Yosuke couldn’t predict it. 

The room has reasonable beige walls, is reasonably lit, has no visible windows (slightly claustrophobic, but still reasonable, considering), traditional flooring — that was a classy touch. He takes in the wide expanse of the bed, the only significant piece of furniture in the room — it takes up a ridiculous amount of space (why shouldn’t it?). 

He hadn’t expected to feel this cramped. The door is locked until Dojima pays at the end of their two hours, he knows this much. Dojima told him this as they were walking to the room, and Yosuke had asked him about what they would do if there was a fire, and Dojima only gave him a look. Okay, out with it: he’s nervous. 

He distracts himself by turning to the TV pressed against the wall opposite from the bed, frowning at its lurid display. He looks for the remote and switches it off. 

Back to the matter at hand. At Yosuke’s request, Dojima sits on the edge of the bed, very obviously indulging him. Yosuke goes to stand in front of him, positioned in between his knees, letting himself be triumphant. 

He takes the knot of Dojima’s tie, hooking it with his fingers. “So, Ryo-chan,” he says, tugging the knot. “Is this your first time on camera? You seem pretty old to be doing —” 

It gets him to crack a smile, at least, laughing a little bit. “Don’t start with that.” 

“You seem nervous, that’s all,” Yosuke lies. He’s having trouble untying the knot on his own, not knowing how this works. Dojima’s fingers tangle with his when he goes to do it himself. (“Here, just — Let me —”) 

The tie comes off, finally, and Yosuke folds it as best he can. “Did I do that right?” he asks, just for something to say. 

“It’s —” Dojima changes his mind. “You’re fine. Leave it.” 

He does. Yosuke gets to work on his shirt buttons next, perfectly attentive, watching as Dojima’s chest rises and falls steadily. This, he can do. He wishes that he could drag this out more. Dojima cooperates when Yosuke pushes his dress shirt off of him, lifts his arms when the undershirt gets tugged over his head. Before this, for whatever reason, that fact that Dojima would be as naked as him had not consciously registered in his mind. He lets himself stare. He had never paid any special attention to the bare chests of other men. _He has chest hair_ , Yosuke thinks. 

His hands hover, and he’s wearing a nervous grin when he looks up to meet Dojima’s eye. There’s an unnatural pause when he realizes that Dojima’s thinking about something difficult. Yosuke’s smile drops. _Don’t_ , he wants to say. _Don’t do this now_. 

“What?”

Dojima opens his mouth to say something, then closes it, reconsidering. “Listen,” he starts, taking Yosuke’s hand gingerly. “We’ve just been, uh, messing around up until this point, and…” He trails off on his own. Yosuke goes quiet instead of helping him. “I want you to know that it’s okay if you don’t want to do this.” Dojima lets go of his hand without thinking. “We can do something else, if you want.” Good God, he sounds like he’s trying to speak another language. It’s hard to watch.

Yosuke knows that he would make this situation worse by snapping at him, by saying something petty and mean. “Do you want to?” he asks instead, trying to be nice.

The answer comes quickly. “Yes,” he says. Then the even quicker correction: “I mean — that doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t.” 

_You’re bad at this,_ Yosuke thinks. He doesn’t say anything immediately, just drops down to his knees again. He looks back up again. This should be a familiar view to him. After a moment of consideration: “I really want you to fuck me.” He stares at him, and keeps staring. Dojima has a dumb look on his face — this is a familiar view to Yosuke. “I think about it all the time.” He averts his eyes. End scene.

He hears a stiff okay from above in response. Yosuke exhales sharply once, and his fingers go to Dojima’s belt buckle with renewed determination.

His fingers work the strap free easily. He’s well-practiced in this. “You like it,” Yosuke says. He pulls the belt through and out. “You don’t have to pretend.” 

“Huh?” Just from the look of his face, Yosuke really can’t tell if he’s playing dumb.

He keeps the belt in his hands, folded in half. “That I’m young.” He had never articulated this before. He had been expecting this to go unsaid indefinitely. “Too young. That I don’t know any better.” He fidgets with the belt without meaning to. “That you’re taking advantage of me.” He makes himself smile, but it doesn’t turn out quite right, because when it comes out of his mouth it doesn’t seem funny at all. None of this does. “And now you’re going to, y’know — ” he makes a vague gesture with his hand. 

Dojima intervenes. “Put that away.” Yosuke realizes that he’s talking about the belt. He obeys, laying it on the floor beside him.

Yosuke doesn’t look him in the eye. “I’ve never kissed anyone before you. Did you know that?” 

That was the wrong thing to say. That was the _worst_ thing he could’ve said. Dojima doesn’t react for a long time, and Yosuke doesn’t want to look up at him to check what kind of expression he has on his face. This might not be forgiven. 

Dojima’s fingers reach out to cautiously lift Yosuke’s chin. He lets his head be angled upwards, waiting for whatever comes next. Dojima’s expression twists. “ _Jesus_ ,” he breathes, entirely to himself. He doesn’t know what kind of realization he has come to but Yosuke knows that it can’t be good. 

He grits his teeth and places a hand on Dojima’s wrist. “Let’s not do this.” He doesn’t hear him, doesn’t look away. “Dojima-san.” Yosuke swears that calling him that had been ironic at some point. 

Dojima finally comes back to himself, pulling his hand back. “Get off me.” There’s no hostility in his voice. Yosuke has to convince himself that there isn’t.

Yosuke stays on the floor, sitting back and leaning on his hands, doing his best attempt at easy composure. He watches Dojima walk away, trying not to think too hard about anything in particular, hoping that whatever just happened is over, that things can fall back into place. 

Dojima takes off his pants, kicking them off as he goes. (Yosuke remembers the clothes strewn across the floor of his room. Even after all these years, he expects a wife to pick up after him — he shouldn’t laugh.) Despite everything, Yosuke frowns, remembering that he was supposed to be doing this for him. 

Dojima crosses to a set of cabinets on the other side of the bed, taking off his socks (now things are getting serious). “Uh —” Yosuke sits up to peer over the bed, at Dojima’s back. “Looking for something?”

He gets no response. Dojima crouches in front of something that looks like a mini fridge, and it takes Yosuke a second to realize that it’s a discreet vending machine — a lingering question that he had been too embarrassed to ask promptly gets answered. 

He sets his expectation — Dojima procuring lube for, well, okay. That’s all. He really isn’t sure if Dojima thinks that he wants him to wear a condom (Yosuke doesn’t know), but he wouldn’t expect anything further than that. Yosuke thinks that he wouldn’t want anything else, because that’s just _weird_. Reconsideration in progress. Now, wait. The notion of Dojima picking out some obscene thing out for him, something to watch him use, on his own dollar — Yosuke couldn’t possibly say no, even if he was too embarrassed, even if — 

He swallows, tries to make himself forget it. That’s something that the Dojima look-alike would do, not this sad man. 

When Dojima turns around to face him, Yosuke feels caught. He realizes that he had almost been hiding behind the bed, relying on it to be a buffer between them. Dojima seems to be in a better mood, at least. Or maybe he’s trying really hard. Either way, Yosuke is appreciative. His eyes flick over to the bottle in Dojima’s hand as he places it on the nightstand at his side. Yosuke shoves his apprehension into a metaphorical safe and climbs over the bed. 

Dojima watches him. “Can’t help but notice that you’re still wearing clothes,” he says, somewhat amused. “You wanna —”

“Right away, sir.” It comes through a little mumbled, despite his intent. Yosuke sits back and pulls off his t-shirt, wriggles out of his pants, feeling Dojima’s eyes on him. He had never before been so conscious of this, the heavy weight of his stare. It’s uncomfortable. 

Yosuke accidentally makes eye contact when he tosses his shirt off the side of the bed. He quickly looks away, pulling off both socks and keeping his underwear on, because Dojima had done the same. They have always been modest in each other's company, or as modest as they could be.

Yosuke is almost naked, and he wants to apologize for this. He looks up, about to say something stupid, but stops when he sees Dojima’s expression. He wishes that he could know what that look means. It’s appraising, Yosuke realizes. Self-satisfied.

“I’d be snapping pictures right now if it wouldn’t add all those years to my prison sentence,” he says. If he had a cigarette he would be taking a drag right now. Yosuke just stares, too shocked to laugh. Since when were jokes like that okay? And from _him_? Dojima doesn’t wait for Yosuke to answer, only indicates with his head. “Come here.” 

Dojima has him by the forearm when he crawls to the edge of the bed, tugging him up and making him stand. This is worse than sitting, Yosuke realizes, like this his body is on display in its entirety. He endures Dojima looking him up and down, staring straight past his head. 

One of his palms goes to rest on his hip, and the fingers of the other hand go to Yosuke’s abdomen, a light touch that makes Yosuke flinch. “Christ,” Dojima says, and this makes Yosuke look at him again, sees his frown. “You need to eat more. I’m serious.” 

“It’s not that bad,” Yosuke says quickly, but Dojima ignores him and feels his ribs. He remembers his dream. 

They’re not getting anywhere like this. Yosuke removes Dojima’s hand from his stomach under the guise of intertwining their fingers. He kisses him, Dojima complies, and this proves to be an ample distraction. He begins to suspect that Dojima had made some silent agreement with himself to throw his prior inhibitions out the window, because right now he is the farthest thing from apprehensive. At the very least, he can rest assured that Dojima isn’t repulsed by his body. It’s evident in the way that Dojima’s hands are no longer gentle. Yosuke takes the next logical step: he wants him. 

The thought makes Yosuke break away, anticipating the trial ahead. Dojima goes for his neck, and it’s hard for Yosuke to say something concrete. “Can we —” he breathes, “Wait a second —”

Dojima stops in place, only because he is still pretending to be polite. “Hm?”

Yosuke pulls away, pushes Dojima to sit on the edge of the bed. “Stay there.” 

He climbs into the bed, pulling back sheets and pushing away an unneeded pillow. Dojima moves as if to follow him — Yosuke feels the shift of weight behind him — and he twists back to him, supporting himself on bent elbows. “What did I say?”

Dojima looks confused, but he’s more interested than anything. He watches Yosuke reach for the bottle at his side, then understands. “You don’t want me to…” It’s funny how they still can’t make specific references. They should be past this by now.

“No.” His fingers go to the waistband of his underwear, in pause. “I know how to do it.” He almost says _I’ve done it myself before_ , but that’s a lie, and if he somehow messed this up and had to ask for help after telling him this Yosuke doesn’t think that he could take it.

Only after he says this can he look Dojima in the face. His eyebrows are slightly raised, trying not to make his surprise too obvious. “Right,” he says, carefully.

Yosuke exhales sharply and begins to tug off his underwear, rolling it off his calves with his foot and kicking it to the floor. He can stand to be watched like this until he can’t. The modest urge overtakes him, and he presses his knees together. He feels hot, like he’s blushing all over. 

He fits the pad of his thumb underneath the cap of the bottle, about to uncap it. “Don’t look,” he says, less confident than he would’ve liked. 

Dojima obliges him, making a show of covering his eyes with hand, resting his elbow on his knee. “Better?”

Much better. This way, he realizes, he can look at Dojima all he wants. He pops the cap off the bottle, steels himself and slicks his fingers with the stuff. He accidentally gets lube on his chest, then on the sheets. Of course. He digs his heels into the mattress, shifts his hips for a slightly better angle. Lying back on a pillow, he flicks his eyes to Dojima’s covering hand before he tries one finger, cringing openly. 

He goes still — no, no, he can’t do this in silence. He swallows before he speaks. “Hey.” He pokes Dojima’s side with his foot. “Say something.” He shifts on the mattress again, restless. 

“Hm?” Obviously amused. “Like what?” 

“I dunno. Anything.” He can’t keep still now. He straightens out, flatter on his back. Tries to move again. “What’d you have for breakfast today?”

Dojima actually laughs at this. It’s as good a sound as anything, infectious. “That’s the best you can come up with?” His other hand circles around Yosuke’s ankle and tugs. 

“Okay, okay, not that —!” He’s surprised when he giggles, fighting against Dojima’s grip and kicking him lightly. “You’re not letting me do my _thing_.” He’s released, but he keeps his foot propped against the juncture of Dojima’s thigh and hip, digging into boxer fabric. He tries another finger (still uncomfortable, still really fucking weird), feeling like he’s doing this in secret. He comes up with a new question. “What are you thinking about right now?”

“What I’m going to have for dinner tonight.” 

This earns him another half-hearted kick with the back of his heel, as much as he can manage in his state. “Be serious.”

Dojima shifts on his forearm, re-adjusting the hand over his eyes. His other hand goes to Yosuke’s ankle again, applying comforting pressure. “You, mostly.” His thumb swipes over the ridge of bone. “What else is there?” 

Yosuke realizes that he had been closing his eyes, his chin pointed towards his chest, lifting his hips. His breaths are shallow now, and surely Dojima has noticed this. “Good answer.” He had almost forgotten to answer him. “You can look now.”

Dojima opens his fingers and peers through. “That easy?” He shifts his body to face him, getting a better view. “I’ll keep that in mind.” There’s a pause, so he can take him in. A hand goes to rest just underneath Yosuke’s knee. “You’re real cute, you know that?” 

Yosuke stops, turns his head to look at him fully. Who is this man? What has happened to the real Dojima? He had never before been this obvious? “Tell me more.” Briefly, his eyes go to Dojima’s crotch. Clothed. _He’s hard_. 

“You say that like I’m lying,” he says. Yosuke can tell that the embarrassment is starting to creep in. Back to routine. “I’m not.” 

Yosuke turns into the pillow, choosing not to answer in any real way. As he works himself open further, he wonders if two fingers are enough. He doesn’t want to try a third, doesn’t know if he should and doesn’t want to ask. Yosuke recalls that Dojima had felt big when he would blow him, but everything feels big when you’re trying to fit as much of it as you can in your mouth. Yosuke would know — after his dream he had started to practice on popsicles in his room with the door locked. Now is not the time to cringe at the memory. The point is that Yosuke wants this to be over already. He feels that he’s making a mistake by rushing, but his own physical well-being has been comparatively low on his list of immediate priorities for a while now, anyway. Part of him thinks that maybe Dojima wants him tight. There’s a golden idea. He swats it away.

Short inhale, short exhale. “I’m ready,” he says. It feels like a lie, because he really isn’t, not in any sense of the word. He wipes his fingers on the sheets beside him, gripping and twisting the fabric in a nervous gesture. 

He watches as Dojima slides his underwear off. Yosuke’s glad to not be the only one naked, at least. He spreads his legs further to accommodate Dojima, who then reaches for the bottle at his side. 

“Hey,” Dojima says, and only then does Yosuke realize that he had been staring. His hand is warm and very present on Yosuke’s inner thigh. He doesn’t remember when he had put it there. “Don’t look.”

Yosuke probably makes a face then, because Dojima laughs. He obeys, even if he was joking, because as much as he would like to watch he would prefer it if Dojima were oblivious to this fact. He tries to keep his eyes on Dojima’s face, on his collarbone, on the flexing muscle of his shoulder. His gaze ventures lower than Dojima’s upper chest only once. It’s easier to look at the space above his head. Yes, this is definitely easier. Maybe this is what Dojima felt like earlier, although he gets ready in only a fraction of the time that it took Yosuke.

The weight shifts on the mattress, and then Dojima’s hand is at the side of Yosuke’s head. Their faces are close, and this intimacy is comfortable and familiar. Yosuke tries to think of something to say, because he feels like he should. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Dojima smiles at him, and for whatever reason it’s this smile, this moment, that makes his entire body feel light. His initial giddiness returns, fidgeting with the bedsheet. 

Dojima looks away from him, turning his attention to Yosuke’s lower half. Yosuke lets himself be positioned, responding reflexively to touches but otherwise not trying to pay much mind. He’s happy, and he will hold onto this for as long as he can.

He goes still, then. Hesitating. “Kid,” he starts, cautiously. Yosuke feels himself go cold. The old Dojima has returned. “What are your grades like?” 

Yosuke could laugh, but right now this is more annoying than funny. He sits up on his elbows and narrows his eyes. “Are you serious?” 

His smile twists, his expression is slightly pained. “I’m just asking because, well.” He thinks for a second. “I never really check in on you like this. Maybe I should.” Pathetic smile. 

_You shouldn’t_ , Yosuke wants to say, but that’s too harsh. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t,” he answers, trying to get back in Yosuke’s good graces by returning his hand to his thigh. “But I want to.” 

“Right now?” Yosuke frowns openly and Dojima is mostly unmoved. His frustration mounts. “Tell me what this is really about.” 

Dojima doesn’t say anything for a while, just considers him wordlessly. He exhales. “Forget I said anything.”

He goes back to manhandling Yosuke (his favorite hobby). Then, finally, he pushes inside him. Yosuke freaks out and tells him to stop halfway through, then changes his mind and tells him to continue. It just feels _weird_ , weirder than his fingers, and it hurts a little bit (his own impatience coming back to bite him — who would’ve thought?). He can’t say any of this to Dojima because the second that he becomes aware of the fact that Yosuke is in any pain at all he will feel guilty and stop entirely. 

It comes down to this: Yosuke can bitch and moan all he wants about the petty ways that Dojima ticks him off but, ultimately, pleasing him is more important to Yosuke than his own comfort. Yosuke just has to grit his teeth and pretend. This is doable. He can think of worse things that he would endure for him. 

Dojima’s inside him fully when he speaks, stopping in what Yosuke had assumed was consideration for him. “Listen,” he says, breathing harder than before. “I don’t want you falling behind in school because —”

“Oh my _God_.”

Dojima ignores him, just looks at him with misplaced sympathy. “You probably have a lot on your mind these days, so —”

This is just confusing now. “I’m sorry,” Yosuke starts, and he resents Dojima for forcing him to form coherent sentences in his current state, “but this father-son roleplay stuff is a major turnoff, so if you could just —” 

Dojima’s free hand goes to grip Yosuke’s chin roughly, so fast that Yosuke had let out a tiny, scared gasp at the sudden jerk of his head. He could’ve just as well hit him — he might. He’s afraid that Dojima might see him panic. He’s trapped, his heartbeat quickens and he can’t make it recede. _Fuck, fuck_. Dojima makes sure that he’s looking him in the eye as he speaks, that he is forced to. “Don’t say shit like that.” 

They stay like that for what feels like a very, very long time. It is silent, save for the sound of their own breathing. Dojima moves first. He lets go of Yosuke’s chin and averts his eyes, so that he’s staring at the rise and fall of Yosuke’s chest instead. Dojima will not apologize, Yosuke knows this much. He never has.

This had happened because he hadn’t been nice to him. Yosuke needs to be nice to him. Somewhere along the line he had lost sight of this very important rule. “I’m sorry,” Yosuke says, as gentle and yielding as he can. “I shouldn’t have said that.” 

Dojima remains unresponsive. Yosuke touches his shoulder lightly. “I’m sorry.” Still nothing. 

“Fuck me already,” Yosuke tries instead. “I’m sorry.” He shifts on his back, trying to get into the right position. “Please.” He struggles to lift his hips and hook his ankles behind Dojima’s back, but he does it, cringing. “I’m sorry. Please fuck me. Please. I’m sorry.” Both of his hands go hold him by his arms, bracing himself, watching his face for clues. “Dojima-san.” Nothing, he sees nothing. 

And then, finally, finally, finally: “Okay.” He looks up at Yosuke, smiling slightly as if nothing was wrong. Even if this feels like an insult, Yosuke doesn’t have the right to be offended. He’s in a delicate position as it is. “Okay,” he says again, “if you say so.”

They have sex, and it’s fine. Yosuke’s only job is to perform well, and he soon realizes that this isn’t too difficult — Dojima does most of the work. All Yosuke has to do is say the right things at the right time, make the right moves, beg and reassure enthusiastically whenever Dojima asks if he’s okay, as if his answer had changed in the thirty seconds since he had last asked. At some point Dojima stops asking, he stops caring about Yosuke’s comfort entirely, not because he’s being purposefully cruel but because he’s enjoying himself. It hurts then.

After repeatedly saying the right thing, he lets himself say the very wrong thing, because he feels that he deserves it. Yosuke finishes before Dojima — this is a first — and just as Dojima’s hand is pushing him over the edge he takes the side of his head and speaks into his ear. In between pants he tells Dojima that he loves him and that he can come inside, which he does. 

Then, it’s over. He knows for a fact that Dojima had gotten more out of the experience than Yosuke had — until that last part. Maybe that was an act of petty revenge. Yosuke can’t explain it himself. 

He gives Dojima’s soul some time for it to return to his body. Before Dojima pulls away from him, Yosuke readies himself for shock, horror, the face of a ruined man who’s come to see the fruition of his worst mistake. 

Instead, he just gets the Dojima he knows. Dojima, with a cringing smile. Dojima, who adores him. “Don’t say that.” Dojima, who pities him. 

Yosuke knows intuitively that Dojima’s self-satisfaction will fizzle out — not now, but soon — and that all he will be left with is the same useless guilt that they are both so familiar with. 

Yosuke stares at him for a long time. “Get off me,” he says, finally.

* * *

Yukiko’s mouth hangs open slightly, her eyes wide. For two entire seconds she’s like this. The gears turn in her head, her expression twists. “Yosuke, that’s —” Her expression is more pained than disapproving. “That’s an awful joke.”

She’s just presented him with an easy way out. Yosuke could take it and forget about this. He’s past this point. It’s been too long, and Yosuke has still not willed his expression to change. 

“Yosuke,” she says again. She lifts her hands but they stop midway, hovering in space uselessly. He looks away and then forces himself to look back at her, to meet her eye. She opens her mouth, preparing a dozen questions that Yosuke doesn’t have the answers for.

The door to the roof swings open, announcing Chie’s arrival. They twist their heads sharply at the noise.

* * *

The intimacy of the bath is more invasive than the intimacy of the bed. Yosuke doesn’t know how this makes sense, but it just does. It’s more uncomfortable, but he will have to endure this. He didn’t want to make him upset. Not again. He hopes that he’s already made it up to him, and if he hasn’t then this act could also be a concession. Yosuke doesn’t know what else he could possibly give him.

He sits in between Dojima’s legs with his back turned to him and endures, and endures some more. He’s grateful that the hard part is over. Yosuke knows that at some point Dojima will be able to get away from work for another day and they will have sex — actual sex — again, he knows that they might have sex multiple times after this, and he knows that somewhere along the line he will have to teach himself to enjoy it as much as Dojima does. That’s something to worry about on another day. For now, he can relax. Or at least try. The adverse effect of all this: without sex, nakedness is unnecessary and even more uncomfortable. He will never get used to this, he thinks, not with anyone else. He curls in on himself. This is where Dojima could realize that there’s something wrong with him, after all. His judgement had been clouded by want before, and now he can see Yosuke for who he really is. Yosuke expects it any second now.

It doesn’t come. Of course it doesn’t, because among many other things Dojima has the capacity to be kind. Yes, there it is — to show Yosuke kindness that he doesn’t deserve and yet takes incessantly. Earlier, he had looked away without being asked when Yosuke had taken the showerhead and cleaned himself before entering the bath. Dojima had also washed his back for him. Yosuke hadn’t returned the favor, he didn’t even ask. 

He wraps his arms around his bent legs, hands gripping his calves. This is his fault. _This_ is an unspecified thing, something Yosuke can’t define, and yet he believes this, feels this, above everything else. Dojima shouldn’t feel guilty. Yosuke has done this. If he could take the blame for this, if he could shoulder all of it, maybe, somehow, — again, Yosuke can’t articulate this logic, it just makes sense — Dojima wouldn’t be so disappointed in him.

 _Damn it._ Yosuke begins to cry. It’s like there’s two of him now, one watching from the outside. _Stupid_ , it thinks, _you’re being stupid_ . Just small, quiet tears at first, Yosuke’s expression barely changes. He hadn’t felt this come on, and he thinks that he can collect himself quickly, or maybe just do this as quietly as he can. Then, he takes a shuddering inhale, and it all comes apart — _godfuckingdammityouactualmoron_ — Dojima has heard him.

He feels his hand on his upper back, near the base of his neck, and Yosuke lets out another — he hates this, he hates it so much — audible sob. 

“Yosuke,” he hears him say. His first name sounds so foreign coming from him. Dojima notices too, because he reverts back to what’s familiar. “Kid.”

Yosuke knows that he can’t be coherent in this state, so he doesn’t try. He lets himself sob openly now, heaving and painful to hear because, fuck it, Dojima knows that he’s crying and there is no use pretending that he’s not. At this point, all he can do is let this run its course, let it move through his body and out of his mouth and then try his best to forget about it when he’s done. Dojima’s thumb strokes his skin. Yosuke cries harder.

The hand that was on his neck goes to his shoulder. “Look at me,” he says. Yosuke lets himself be turned halfway, back to the edge of the tub, his elbow knocking against Dojima’s leg, his own limbs bent awkwardly. From some detached place he thinks, _I’m too tall for this_. 

He looks over his shoulder to face Dojima. His vision is blurred by tears. He blinks them away as best he can, meets Dojima’s eye and then starts crying all over again. After everything else he had endured this really shouldn’t faze him, but having Dojima see his face as he sobs is uniquely unbearable.

Dojima’s concern is unbearable, too. He looks so lost, so confused, but worst of all is the pity. When he reaches towards him Yosuke flinches imperceptibly. Dojima gingerly touches the side of his face, holds him. “Yosuke,” he tries again. “What happened?” 

He knows what happened — he was there. Yosuke just shakes his head. His hand goes up to his face but Dojima’s is there before him, wiping his tears away clumsily. “Yosuke, Yosuke,” he says, with a hushing quality. “It’s okay.” (What? What’s okay? How is any of this okay?) 

The heaving sobs have subsided, but his eyes still water. He sniffs, aware that he’s pouting. Dojima isn’t angry. He’s the farthest thing from it. Yosuke whimpers, a pathetic sound, and turns away from him. Dojima’s hand goes to the crook of his neck, rubbing reassuringly. He tries to breathe normally again.

Ten seconds pass. Dojima’s hand has stopped in place. Yosuke clears his throat before speaking. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Dojima pulls away his hand. They sit like that some more, silent, waiting.

Then, Yosuke’s stomach lurches. He panics, twists and scrambles out of the bath, slipping, knocking his knees painfully against the tile, then getting up just as fast. He hadn’t vomited like this since he was nine years old, maybe eleven — too far back to remember. He has no idea why this is happening now. 

He hears Dojima call after him, he hears that he’s concerned, maybe scared. Yosuke isn’t paying attention. There is a dividing wall between the toilet and bath. Good. His fingers claw blindly, feeling something disgusting and full rise up in his throat as he pries open the seat cover. 

He grips the edge of the bowl, and he heaves — nothing. The nausea is there, twisting his stomach, there’s that sharp sting of pain in his temples, but he can’t bring himself to do it. He heaves once more and fails. 

He feels a palm in between his shoulder blades. Dojima says something in a soft voice but Yosuke doesn’t register it. He is being kind. Yosuke wishes that he would leave. He lets himself think it: _this is annoying, he is being annoying, he annoys me_. 

He tries again, but there is nothing to throw up — he had skipped lunch. Another unsuccessful retch for good measure. Yosuke’s shoulders drop. He lets his forehead knock against the rim of the bowl and stares blankly at the grout between the tiles as Dojima rubs circles into his back.

He can’t even do _this_ right.


End file.
